"self-servingness" meaning in English

See self-servingness in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Etymology: From self-serving + -ness. First use appears c. 1915. See cite below. Etymology templates: {{suffix|en|self-serving|-ness}} self-serving + -ness Head templates: {{en-noun|-|nolinkhead=1}} self-servingness (uncountable)
  1. The state of someone or something being self-serving. Tags: uncountable
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          "ref": "1915, Ohio. Circuit Court, Vinton Randall Shepard (editor), Ohio Appellate and Circuit Court Reports, volume 23, page 5:",
          "text": "Reducing it then to its proper level of a statement and no more, and annexing to it its self-appearing quality of self-servingness, and its incompetency to conclude one not served by it and a stranger to it, for aught that is shown, becomes clear, as we think.",
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          "ref": "1982, Robert Bohm, Notes on India, page 3:",
          "text": "The fact is that it's impossible to write about India without confronting head-on the narrowness and self-servingness of some of our lingering colonial assumptions about the nature of Indian society.",
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          "ref": "1986, Louise Bernikow, Alone in America, The Search for Companionship, page 158:",
          "text": "discounting the self-servingness of his talk and the general edginess and uncertainty that must have accompanied the months before In Search of Excellence was in print, sold millions of copies , moved him out of that office into bigger ones, sent him traveling as one of America's highest-paid speakers on the lecture circuit",
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          "ref": "1987, John Wheatcroft, The Beholder's Eye, page 120:",
          "text": "Rather, she'd be exposed to a mixture of bluster, scapegoating, rationalization, self-servingness, face-saving, self-delusion, self-pity, and outright lie.",
          "type": "quote"
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        {
          "ref": "1996, John Kleinig, The Ethics of Policing, page 224:",
          "text": "Sometimes the work of internal affairs divisions is compromised by their own corruption and self-servingness, thus feeding the very cynicism that is destructive of a genuinely professional service: Who watches those who watch the watchers?",
          "type": "quote"
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          "ref": "2013, Heidi M. Ravven, The Self Beyond Itself, An Alternative History of Ethics, the New Brain Sciences, and the Myth of Free Will:",
          "text": "Goleman speculates about what evolutionary survival advantage the self-servingness and hence (implicitly and necessarily) self-deceptiveness of our beliefs might have, besides making life more fun and less scary.",
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          "ref": "1915, Ohio. Circuit Court, Vinton Randall Shepard (editor), Ohio Appellate and Circuit Court Reports, volume 23, page 5:",
          "text": "Reducing it then to its proper level of a statement and no more, and annexing to it its self-appearing quality of self-servingness, and its incompetency to conclude one not served by it and a stranger to it, for aught that is shown, becomes clear, as we think.",
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          "ref": "1982, Robert Bohm, Notes on India, page 3:",
          "text": "The fact is that it's impossible to write about India without confronting head-on the narrowness and self-servingness of some of our lingering colonial assumptions about the nature of Indian society.",
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        },
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          "ref": "1986, Louise Bernikow, Alone in America, The Search for Companionship, page 158:",
          "text": "discounting the self-servingness of his talk and the general edginess and uncertainty that must have accompanied the months before In Search of Excellence was in print, sold millions of copies , moved him out of that office into bigger ones, sent him traveling as one of America's highest-paid speakers on the lecture circuit",
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          "ref": "1987, John Wheatcroft, The Beholder's Eye, page 120:",
          "text": "Rather, she'd be exposed to a mixture of bluster, scapegoating, rationalization, self-servingness, face-saving, self-delusion, self-pity, and outright lie.",
          "type": "quote"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1996, John Kleinig, The Ethics of Policing, page 224:",
          "text": "Sometimes the work of internal affairs divisions is compromised by their own corruption and self-servingness, thus feeding the very cynicism that is destructive of a genuinely professional service: Who watches those who watch the watchers?",
          "type": "quote"
        },
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          "ref": "2013, Heidi M. Ravven, The Self Beyond Itself, An Alternative History of Ethics, the New Brain Sciences, and the Myth of Free Will:",
          "text": "Goleman speculates about what evolutionary survival advantage the self-servingness and hence (implicitly and necessarily) self-deceptiveness of our beliefs might have, besides making life more fun and less scary.",
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-03-13 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-03-02 using wiktextract (f074e77 and 633533e). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

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