make yourself respectable

respectable | American Dictionary

respectable
adjective
us/rɪˈspek·tə·bəl/
socially acceptable because of having a good character or appearance or behaving in a way that is approved of:
It was hard to find a clean shirt that looked respectable enough to be seen in.
Respectable also means large enough or good enough to be acceptable:
a respectable income
Her school has a respectable basketball program.

respectability

noun[ U ]us/rɪˌspek·təˈbɪl·ɪ·t̬i/
Everything in the hotel had an air of old-time respectability.

Examples of respectable

respectable
Unemployment and poverty are viewed as acceptable and respectable reasons for men's performance of ' female' activities.
Nevertheless, he believed that in order to make such an inference ' respectable ', he had to coerce it into the straightjacket of the syllogistic formula.
After all, this was, in a sense, behaviour in which the respectable were no longer allowed to participate.
After its initial difficulties, it was, he declared, finally 'a respectable academic discipline'.
She consulted many respectable people in the village, but none could see a way out of the difficulty.
Similarly, respectable and ' ideal ' husbands were expected to work hard to keep their marriages intact.
The intrinsically clean quarry dust produces a respectable and moral quarrier.
Only a few years ago it would have sounded bizarre to call language a "resource," except in the respectable sense of culture or literature.
Each subject has a respectable bibliography, with, in many cases, a discography, videography, and list of related sheet music.
The level of support that it received from within the musical establishment suggests a highly respectable and well-connected body.
Separate analyses were performed for each prognostic factor in order to obtain a respectable degree of accuracy considering the size of our patient sample.
The party was at that time also carrying out a twofold strategy of street activism while maintaining a respectable parliamentary appearance.
Respectable outsiders embraced the movement's social work but increasingly rejected its evangelical message.
The editors have done well to bring together so many respectable authors in this increasingly disparate field and for this they should be congratulated.
Though he was served food when we ate, interaction between musicians and 'respectable' people was kept to the strictly musical.
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These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.