John's gone too genteel for bloodletting.

Far worse for Europe would be to avoid serious reform and lapse into egalitarian and genteel decline.

Four decades ago, in more genteel times, an opposition legislator once ended a debate whose outcome was a foregone conclusion, with the words, We have the arguments.

It was a poky, little, shabby genteel place, where four lines of dingy two storied brick houses looked out into a small railed in enclosure, where a lawn of weedy grass and a few clumps of faded