| In such a shape the patriotic instinct may tend in natures weaker than Bolingbroke's to mawkishness or sentimentality. |
| Still, if you compare the film with other such chick flicks, it's jauntily efficient, with enough waspish one-liners to offset the mawkishness. |
| What follows from here is unbridled mawkishness interrupted by some slapstick comedy. |
| The composer can mistake cuteness for cleverness, and like any unabashed sentimentalist, he's often a stone's throw from mawkishness. |
| The mawkishness of the sentiment was only surpassed by the feebleness of the style. |
| But to delight the spirit is not to engage in mawkishness or to cover the truth with a veneer of deceptive delicacy either, for the truth can never bear that. |
