foible

It helps fund managers justify their salaries and makes ordinary people feel better because of a foible known as the illusion of control.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 2, 2026

Mice, it turns out, can’t puke — a little foible that typically makes it difficult to use them to study nausea.

From New York Times ● Nov. 1, 2022

Jones happily recites the joke using the other word, and the two men laugh, having been caught in a foible of their profession.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 26, 2021

This is not merely an eccentric interpretation of the facts or an interesting foible, nor is it an irrelevant example of anguished post-presidency chatter.

From Salon ● Jun. 4, 2021

When, on the contrary, he began to be criticized for his supposed foible for the French Revolution, such attacks became far more pressing.

From Thomas Jefferson The Apostle of Americanism by Gilbert Chinard

But here, even as he makes sport of his characters’ foibles and blinkered worldviews, he views them with a compassion that feels free of judgment, and touched with grace.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 19, 2026

“It is infectious to play a character who sees the best in people and isn’t mad at the world for all its foibles and bullies and shadows,” Sudeikis recently told the Hollywood Reporter.

From MarketWatch ● Jul. 31, 2026

Throughout his career, Neill pitted himself against creatures both real and imagined — or, even more often, somewhere in-between — to reveal humanity’s foibles in the face of the freakish and fantastic.

From Salon ● Jul. 17, 2026

Brandon Webb is talking the way parents do when their kids aren’t around—tallying their strengths and foibles, failures and wins, and the extent to which his own shortcomings as a father may have contributed.

From The Wall Street Journal ● May 4, 2026

Surely I don't have to remind you that our professional duty is not to our own foibles and sentiments, but to the wishes of our employer.'

From "The Remains of the Day" by Kazuo Ishiguro