preen

Mr Kernan halted and preened himself before the sloping mirror of Peter Kennedy, hairdresser. Stylish coat, beyond a doubt. Scott of Dawson street. Well worth the half sovereign I gave Neary for it.

His preening self-satisfaction, chest thrown forward as he settles into a chair in his mansion...

In Miller's view the play is expressive of a peculiarly Renaissance vision of the harmonious marriage within the orderly society: 'its spirit derives from Elizabethan Puritanism's view of the household as an orderly place in whichc the marriage is consecrated not in the church but in the orderly procedures of domesticity ; in which obedience is required , not in order to preen the male pride of the father, but to restore order in a fallen world '

My two roommates are engineers who preen the diesels.

Adjusting his spectacles on the bridge of his nose, he gently preened the bush with his pruners.

He brushed and preened the marquis, front and back. “Lucky we are, Your Grace, no gashes that I see. But the beard is in a woeful state —”