pleasantry

Vargas, suspecting the conversation would turn into a recruitment pitch, stopped responding after exchanging pleasantries.

But this pleasantry, excellent as pleasantry, hardly deserves serious refutation.

It is a continental form of pleasantry, and an artistic experiment in blasphemy which is taken seriously by the unwise.

She looked up with a sort of half smile, as if she suspected some pleasantry of which she had not yet detected the drift.

"I think there is no necessity for carrying a pleasantry into our private life," she said, in a perfectly amiable voice.

This was evidently local pleasantry, for the old man cackled over it, and his cronies joined in with gusto.