informality

• Audio (US):

  (file)

informality (countable and uncountable, plural informalities)

1. The condition of being informal.
   • 1936 June 30, Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, →OCLC; republished New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, 1944, →OCLC:

     These people, drawn from many different places and with many different backgrounds, gave the whole life of the County an informality that was new to Ellen, an informality to which she never quite accustomed herself.

2. An informal term or usage; a colloquialism.
   • 1976 December 18, Rudy Kikel, “The Doomsday Book by the Jewish Comedian”, in Gay Community News, volume 4, number 25, page 14:

     One long riff without a beginning and without an end {{..}}, only portions of which […] may be served up to us here, punctuated — the word hardly seems appropriate to a piecemeal poetry in which, except for the ubiquitous slash, there is precious little punctuation — momentarily halted, then, by an affirmative informality ("yeah"), by a labored repetition ("he was/ he was/ i swear he was"), or by a barbarous appeal for final comprehension: "know what i mean/ dontyah dontyah dontyah know what i mean."

• formality