Roth, priggish to the end, responds, "I'm warning you—stay away from my kids!"
Her temper was even, and her nature was finer than her prim, priggish ways would have led the casual acquaintance to suppose.
He was deep in a business discussion with his priggish son-in-law.
At first Bobbie found it quite hard to be as nice to him as she wanted to be, for fear he should think her priggish.
He was selfish and priggish and worse, he was piggish—A regular beast of a brute.
They too can on such occasions be priggish if not downright hypocritical.
Perhaps it is priggish of me, but I feel that if I'm mean in one thing I may be mean in another.
The praise given to him is not a priggish fiction of our conventional history, though such fictions have illogically curtailed it.
She watched Paul growing irritable, priggish, and melancholic.
To lug in morals, or ulterior effect on character at every point, is to cultivate moral valetudinarianism or priggish posing.
"precisian in speech or manners," 1753, originally in reference to theological scruples (1704), of unknown origin; earlier appearances of the same word meaning "dandy, fop" (1670s), "thief" (c.1600; in form prigger recorded from 1560s) could be related, as could thieves' cant prig "a tinker" (1560s).
A p[rig] is wise beyond his years in all the things that do not matter. A p. cracks nuts with a steam hammer: that is, calls in the first principles of morality to decide whether he may, or must, do something of as little importance as drinking a glass of beer. On the whole, one may, perhaps, say that all his different characteristics come from the combination, in varying proportions, of three things--the desire to do his duty, the belief that he knows better than other people, & blindness to the difference in value between different things. ["anonymous essay," quoted in Fowler, 1926]Related: Priggery.
