It was easy enough to mock it as hipster affectation, and in some cases it was.

FORBES: Willy DeVille

For most of us soccer is just an odd affectation of foreigners, like minuscule cars, pink shirts on men and the metric system.

ECONOMIST: Island story

From the vantage point of the supposedly classless 1990s, the effort which Anthony Wedgwood Benn put into reinventing himself as plain Tony Benn may sound like an affectation.

ECONOMIST: A great parliamentarian

One small quibble is the affectation in the title that this period of California's history began in 1950 and ended in 1963 (coincidentally the year of President Kennedy's assassination).

ECONOMIST: The California dream

The South Carolina rice farmer, who died in 1873, is said to have "despised affectation and looked with perfect contempt upon all snobbery, " according to a book about his life.

FORBES: Million-Dollar Grits

Bizarrely, one of Dr Lomborg's critics in Scientific American criticises as an affectation the book's insistence on documenting every statistic and every quotation with a reference to a published source.

ECONOMIST: ��The Skeptical Environmentalist��

Part of the problem is a tendency to affectation.

ECONOMIST: What to do?

All of his languages, English, Dari, and Pashtu, sounded like "moosh, moosh, moosh, " and he had the affectation of pursing his lips when he spoke, giving the impression that he was blowing kisses to the listener.

NPR: Sergeant Notes Odd Rituals of War in Afghanistan

He spoke of distances in metres and kilometres, and it took me a while to understand that this was not an affectation so much as a driving need to convert units of measurement more or less instantaneously.

NEWYORKER: Midnight in Dostoevsky