What's the difference between abject and sordid?

Abject


Definition:

  • (a.) Cast down; low-lying.
  • (a.) Sunk to a law condition; down in spirit or hope; degraded; servile; groveling; despicable; as, abject posture, fortune, thoughts.
  • (a.) To cast off or down; hence, to abase; to degrade; to lower; to debase.
  • (n.) A person in the lowest and most despicable condition; a castaway.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) He is an expert on the public health problems that plague El Paso and the other cities along the international border, all of which are exacerbated by abject poverty and a burgeoning population.
  • (2) During his long stint in the witness stand, Harris was questioned at length about why he expressed abject remorse to the father for his actions, offering a little more credible explanation than he felt ending the relationship had upset the woman.
  • (3) And while Altmejd presents sexual scenes of cartoonish horror and disgust, Lucas's art has embraced lavatorial humour, abjection, self-denigration, the pithy sculptural one-liner and the obscene gesture.
  • (4) An Israeli commentator said of the first of them: "when one looks through all the lofty phraseology, all the deliberate disinformation, the hundreds of pettifogging sections, sub-sections, appendices and protocols, one clearly recognises that the Israeli victory was absolute and Palestine defeat abject."
  • (5) It is an abject failure to take the rights of females seriously.
  • (6) Obviously Pantilimon is more abject than Hart,” says Graham Lees “and Demichelis must have lied on his CV but why does no one bemoan the wretchedness, sorry, opportunity gifted to Sunderland, of Nasri’s selection?
  • (7) Indeed, we have been reminded recently of the abject poverty that many have fallen into, needing to use food banks or choose between "eating and heating" and the need for charitable institutions to step forward and help the needy.
  • (8) Now, millions of working people who would otherwise be languishing in abject poverty depend on these tax credits.
  • (9) It was an abject defeat for a leader whose response to the migration crisis deserved better.
  • (10) Meanwhile the victims are sitting there in abject poverty and have not received any compensation."
  • (11) The aim was to secure a politically and militarily allied government in a strategically important country, a mission which David Cameron amusingly declared this week to have been "accomplished" despite the western alliance's abject failure over 12 years to defeat that Taliban's rag-tag army and the refusal of the corrupt Hamid Karzai administration to play ball over the country's long-term future .
  • (12) But it bears testament, too, to the Brown government's abject failure to give a comprehensible account of itself that the opposition should find such easy pickings.
  • (13) It's all there: sexual and social confusion, vulnerability and violence, alienation and loneliness, the oscillation between feeling abject and worthless and wanting to take over the world, the fantasies of power and revenge.
  • (14) "Outright hostility, abject surrender - that's what you have seen in the past.
  • (15) The picture you have painted is one of abject squalor made worse by a generally lazy approach to hygiene.
  • (16) Smith could not have been more abjectly humiliated.
  • (17) Given the abject failure of much of the western media to scrutinise its actions – at least until it's too late – it may believe it can get away with it.
  • (18) He ended up with five during the Euro 2016 qualifying campaign but all came in the fixtures against an abject Gibraltar, featuring a hat-trick in the home game scored, memorably, from a combined total of eight yards.
  • (19) Mick Cash, RMT general secretary, said: “The abject failure by Southern rail in yesterday’s talks to take the safety issues seriously has left us with no option but to confirm further action.
  • (20) Recent weeks have seen a succession of good news stories from Iraq, including the ceremonial reopening of the national museum, whose looting in 2003 symbolised the abject failure to plan for the post-war period.

Sordid


Definition:

  • (a.) Filthy; foul; dirty.
  • (a.) Vile; base; gross; mean; as, vulgar, sordid mortals.
  • (a.) Meanly avaricious; covetous; niggardly.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Haki's naivety about English detective fiction is more than matched by Latimer's ingenuous excitement as Haki describes to him Dimitrios's sordid career, and he decides it would be fun to write the gangster's biography.
  • (2) It might be really sordid and bad sexual etiquette, but whatever else it is, it is not rape or you bankrupt the term rape of all meaning."
  • (3) Scarcely a day goes by without another apology for past failures, another gimmicky new policy, another sordid attempt to grab headlines.
  • (4) A former police officer is less complimentary: "The clientele in these places are by definition pretty sordid, highly manipulative and sleazy," he says.
  • (5) As Margarito and Inez argue over what really happened that day in Culiacan, it seems that they are no longer describing yet another sordid killing in the endless war on drugs.
  • (6) How could any organisation survive the sordid revelations that emerged at the Leveson inquiry, costing the Murdoch empire millions in compensation and legal fees, along with the closure of a flagship title?
  • (7) He recalled the stench and listening to the screams of others echoing through their sordid dungeon.
  • (8) The "titillating details" of the "sordid affairs" of the Anna Nicole saga "enticed" Bahamians and changed the face of the island's politics, two confidential memos sent by the embassy in Nassau reveal.
  • (9) "Of all the sites, it was the most depressing and slightly sordid," she says, "while other places often had an air of melancholy or seemed slightly otherworldly at dawn.
  • (10) Wilde takes no prisoners from the very outset: “The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others.” It’s a very Wildean, quasi-epigrammatic reversal – the reader expects something worthy, collectivist and altruistic, instead he gets something that’s irreverent, individualistic and apparently selfish.
  • (11) To begin with, it was a different kind of image problem: in Georgian society gin was considered rackety and sordid, not fusty and old-fashioned as it was in the swinging 60s.
  • (12) Often only one – and sometimes no – carriage door would open when they pulled into a station, and in summer they were “cooled” only by the methodical sweep of a begrimed metal fan that just pushed the sordid air about.
  • (13) The principle is a simple one: it involves national resources going into education, health and housing, instead of being siphoned off into the offshore accounts of the super-rich or squandered on sordid overseas conflicts, instigated by the inadequate for the profit of their paymasters.
  • (14) In her 1963 novel A Summer Birdcage , Margaret Drabble’s narrator Sarah describes a “loathsome flat” in the King’s Road, Chelsea, and an “unspeakably sordid” place in Highgate.
  • (15) Again, my first instinct is that they must have been rubbernecking, the sordid allegations having made HRH a rather grim sort of draw, or at the very least not as ferociously dull and pointless as the rest of the apres-ski programme .
  • (16) One letter said: "Will some evil person leak the entire proceedings and all the sordid details so that the irresponsible global media … can really get their teeth into them?"
  • (17) Two years ago, in a joint interview with Ruth Rendell, the writers were asked by a Daily Telegraph reporter, "how two respectable, middle-class ladies" could be involved in the "sordid world of crime fiction?"
  • (18) At the same time, the cable adds, the "titillating details of Anna Nicole's sordid affairs have enticed the Bahamian public to give renewed focus to government indiscretions".
  • (19) This is a potentially serious point, seeing as to require any priest to solemnise what he believes to be sordid would be to mandate hypocrisy and thereby demean the prospective services.
  • (20) But the release of three separate reports on Friday; from the Metropolitan police and the NSPCC, the Crown Prosecution Service and from Surrey police, has shed harsh light on what Commander Peter Spindler of Scotland Yard labelled a sordid tale of a larger than figure who had "groomed the nation".