insular

insular, provincial, parochial, local, small-town are comparable when they mean having or indicating the limited or restricted point of view considered characteristic of the geographically isolated.

Insular is usually applied to people or the ideas of people who are in one way or another isolated, so that they become or are regarded as self- contained or self-sufficient and disinterested in matters remote from their own concçrns. The term implies an aloofness that proceeds from this isolation, but it usually also connotes narrowness of attitude, circumscription of interests, or prejudices in favor of one's own people or one's own kind (as of customs, literature, and art)

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much of the impetus for international thinking and planning has come from our schools and our colleges, and the pressures for insular chauvinism have come from self-seeking groups of adults— Brown

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Bradley was fighting for a European and ripened and wise philosophy, against an insular and immature and cranky one— T. S. Eliot

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Provincial sometimes applies to what is characteristic of outlying districts as in opposition to what is characteristic of such metropolitan centers as London or New York

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a provincial accent

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provincial theaters

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provincial fashions

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but the word tends to connote narrowness of view or of interest as opposed to what is cosmopolitan or catholic

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he replaced a philosophy which was crude and raw and provincial by one which was, in comparison, catholic, civilized, and universal— T. S. Eliot

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firm commitment to a given ideal is not equivalent to provincial intolerance towards other forms of excellence— Nagel

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Stalin, a provincial, Victorian philistine, fancied himself as an infallible connoisseur— Willets

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Parochial, with its reference to a parish, a local unit of administration in the church or, in some regions, in the state, implies confinement to views and interests of a particular place and connotes extreme narrowness and, often, intolerance

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of all kinds of human energy, Art is surely the most free, the least parochial; and demands of us an essential tolerance of all its forms— Galsworthy

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even so great a historian as Pirenne is parochial compared with Mr. Toynbee, who has literally taken the world ... as his province— Brogan

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small wonder that the news is often out-of-date, and that it is mostly political polemics or parochial gossip— Kimble

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Local comes very close to parochial in meaning, but it carries a less distinct suggestion of narrowness or of intolerance; it rather implies the strong impress produced by the place in which one lives on one's speech, one's customs, or one's interests and is distinguished from broad or general

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the local and even parochial Concord mind . . . proved to be . . . national— Brooks

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the affair was only of local interest

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Small-town implies a relation to smaller towns as opposed to larger, or metropolitan, centers and thus comes close to provincial and local; distinctively, it often stresses the dullness or gaucheness or philistinism felt to characterize such an environment

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small-town gossip

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small-town society

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it needn't be much to look big to a small-town girl—5. R. L.

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the small-town mind is as formidable a factor in Irish as in American life— New Statesman

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people get married beneath them every day, and I don't see any sign of the world coming to an end. Don't be so small-town— Welty

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Analogous words: isolated, insulated, secluded (see ISOLATE): circumscribed, limited, restricted, confined (see LIMIT vb): narrow, narrow-minded, *illiberal: aloof, unconcerned, *indifferent