[f. FLIPPANT: see -ANCY.] The quality of being flippant; esp. disposition to trifle, frivolity; occas. in earlier use, Volubility.
1746. H. Walpole, Lett. H. Mann (1834), II. clxix. 176. The famous orator Henley is taken up for treasonable flippancies.
1789. Mrs. Piozzi, Journ. France, I. 8. The pert vivacity of La Fille at Montreuil was all we could find there worth remarking: it filled up my notions of French flippancy agreeably enough; as no English wench would so have answered one to be sure.
1807. trans. Goede’s Trav., II. 183. A continued flippancy of chit-chat in the boxes, excludes all attention to the performers.
1808. Med. Jrnl., XIX. Jan., 15. He went a step further, and with asperity and flippancy adverted to a remarkable case I had written on nearly two years back.
1874. L. Stephen, Hours in Library (1892), I. vii. 268. I have always found gross inaccuracies and almost always effeminate prejudices and mere flippancies draped in elaborate rhetoric.
1882. Miss Braddon, Mt. Royal, I. ii. 64. Why, Jessie, you are generally the very essence of flippancy—who make light of almost everything in life—except religion.
