Less than pleased

The village elders seem less than pleased with the girls wearing jeans!

Suresh impressed the interviewers with his technical knowledge but they were less than pleased with his English speaking skills. Since the job also required a lot of client interaction, excellent communication skills we a necessity.

When I told my dad that I wanted to marry my college sweetheart, he was less than pleased. Nevertheless, he agreed.

His boss was less than pleased to hear his plans of leaving the company. However, there was little he could do.

The broad sense of less than pleased is pretty obvious. It means not exactly pleased, actually upset. So if you say your dad was less than pleased with your decision to join the army, you are saying he was not very happy. It still doesn’t mean he screamed and shouted and became fiery angry. Less than pleased doesn’t indicate a strong disapproval or the state of being very very upset. It signifies a mild displeasure. Your dad was not very happy with your decision to join the army but he allowed you nevertheless. He wasn’t so upset as to proactively try to dissuade or stop you from doing something he is less than pleased about.

Thus, you should use “less than please” in situations where the person in question is mildly displeased. He would prefer if you didn’t do that but he won’t exactly throw a fit if you went ahead and did it.

Let’s take some more examples:

1. Several people are less than pleased with the government decision to raise the petrol prices but it seems it can’t be helped.
2. I had a long meeting with the boss over the project progress. He was less than pleased because of the delayed deliveries but then we explained to him that we were at least two people short on our team. He agreed to allocate two new engineers to us and insisted that we do all further deliveries on time.