Plaintive \Plain"tive\, a. [F. plaintif. See {Plaintiff}, n.] 1. Repining; complaining; lamenting. --Dryden.
2. Expressive of sorrow or melancholy; mournful; sad. ``The most plaintive ditty.'' --Landor. ※ -- {Plain"tive*ly}, adv. -- {Plain"tive*ness}, n.
The songs, mainly about love among the glaciers, are excellent, plaintive and pure, especially the genuine frustrations in 'There's more to life than this' and the credibly innocent 'Violently Happy'.
Rivers, looking like a leather-clad pipe cleaner man, cut through the fog with plaintive soprano scribbling and shrill flight with the flute.
On the same label, Berlioz specialist Sir Colin Davis conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in his second "Harold in Italy" (he first recorded it more than two decades ago with Yehudi Menuhin), featuring Nobuko Imai's plaintive and lyrical viola.
Instead, it is a celebration of some of plaintive ballads, such as "Farther On," "For a Dancer" and "Before the Deluge," that first brought Browne acclaim.
Check out the snap and funk of "Brother Jake" or the plaintive moan of Link Wray's "Fallin' Rain" and try to come up with a band that's better at getting an audience to dance and cry within a beat.
Josef Luftensteiner's Augustin, properly droopy-eyed, sounds like an operetta-artiste where a plaintive pop-voice would suit better.
In fact, the tall and lanky politician with sloping posture and a plaintive voice is fond of saying he is "not presidential." But his long career in politics belies that self-portrait.
It would have to be admitted that the begrudgers in our midst have increased mightily and filled the land with their plaintive cries and lamentations." He is survived by his wife, three sons and a daughter.
Democrat Michael Dukakis was solid and smooth in the debate finale in Los Angeles, even if his refrain of complaints about being called a liberal did take on a plaintive air.
When Mr. Kilgore died in 1967, his last words to his successor framed a plaintive question about the Observer: "Will my baby make it?"