What's the difference between abjure and forswear?

Abjure


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To renounce or reject with solemnity; to recant; to abandon forever; to reject; repudiate; as, to abjure errors.
  • (v. t.) To renounce upon oath; to forswear; to disavow; as, to abjure allegiance to a prince. To abjure the realm, is to swear to abandon it forever.
  • (v. i.) To renounce on oath.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Surely the great strength of Shakespeare is precisely that he abjures cognitive or philosophical thinking in favour of a Wittgensteinian showing.
  • (2) The renewed debate on the nation’s constitutional future has led to some laughable abjurations from both sides.
  • (3) If modern Germany is more at ease abjuring the power and responsibilities of leadership in favour of a quiet, comfortable life, the frictions and misunderstandings making the European crisis worse are rooted in other psychological and cultural factors.
  • (4) It is the coital position favoured by informed liberals everywhere and abjured by all free Presbyterians for fear it may lead to dancing.
  • (5) If the talks succeed, Wilders will be in the enviable position of wielding power while abjuring responsibility.
  • (6) In it, he shows Galileo querying the existing cosmic order and being forced to abjure his theories under threat of torture.
  • (7) His decision to abjure the splendour of the apostolic palace in favour of the modest Casa Santa Marta guesthouse has offered proof of his personal commitment to a humbler church, while his tender embracing of Vinicio Riva, a man terribly disfigured by tumours , underlined his hands-on pastoral approach.
  • (8) Kafka was slim and underweight throughout his life and showed an ascetic attitude and abjuration of physical enjoyment and pleasure (fasting, vegetarianism, sexual abstinence, emphasis on physical fitness).
  • (9) In return for his solemnly abjuring all further claims on Israel, Israel would acquiesce in the emergence of a Palestine state.
  • (10) Pope Francis led the Jesuits through Argentina's dirty war and has consistently abjured the trappings of office while Welby, who began his professional life in the oil business, has worked as a peace negotiator in some of the most dangerous places in the world .
  • (11) Not only did he abjure the cardinal's residence in the Argentinian capital for a small apartment and reject a chauffeur-driven car to travel by bus, he also told hundreds of Argentinians not to waste their money on plane tickets to Rome to see him created a cardinal by John Paul II in 2001, urging them to give it instead to the poor.
  • (12) According to European officials briefed on today's talks in Moscow with President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, the Russians are insisting on an end to 15 years of Georgian troops being part of the peacekeeping contingent in breakaway South Ossetia and are demanding that Saakashvili sign a legally binding pledge abjuring the use of all armed force in relation to the two pro-Russian provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
  • (13) They have no possessive pronouns (not “you can borrow my handkerchief”, but “you can share the handkerchief I use”) and abjure possessive sexuality.
  • (14) The "newness" in each of these senses should abjure the capital "N" that has now run its course.
  • (15) Treatment of symptoms and improving the quality of life is imperative, yet many physicians abjure intervention, for reasons which are not entirely clear.
  • (16) Since 2001, BNP’s abjuring of any allegiance to such an ideal has been devastating.
  • (17) I'm still not vegetarian, but the older I get, the less defensible this state becomes – and not just because it's an implied term in my Guardian contract that I must abjure not only at least seven-eighths of any joy that comes my way in life but also any meat that isn't certified organic Norfolk roadkill or the cow in Douglas Adams' restaurant at the end of the universe .
  • (18) As to Havel's "idealism" – if that is what one must call serious ecological concern, an abjuring of narrow nationalism and materialism, and an eye on what the market's "hidden hand" is actually up to or capable of – he left us with some reason, in these dangerous early years of the new millennium, to think that the "realist" critique of such preoccupations was itself anachronistic.
  • (19) It abjures the nationalism and militarism that archaic phrase implies.
  • (20) Whenever I hear Iain Duncan Smith pontificating about the need for the unemployed to show initiative and find themselves jobs, I think of the fortunate frog urging the tadpoles to abjure welfare dependency.

Forswear


Definition:

  • (v. i.) To reject or renounce upon oath; hence, to renounce earnestly, determinedly, or with protestations.
  • (v. i.) To deny upon oath.
  • (v. i.) To swear falsely; to commit perjury.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) There is something Spielbergian about his commitment to small characters and well-crafted performances, but he forswears Spielberg’s manipulations and sentimentality – real anguish is palpably present here.
  • (2) It is true I have not been killed or crippled, been a loser in the stocks, or had to forswear my fatherland, but I have not quite gone free and have a right to say something."
  • (3) But even that glass ran dry after a near brush with death, while the loss of a yard of intestine in the late 1990s led to him forswearing alcohol exactly a year after his younger brother Piers had died of an alcohol-related disease.
  • (4) They also wanted him to forswear trying those charged in military commissions that the supreme court had junked in a 2008 ruling.
  • (5) One apparent exception to the Yemen-Somalia model of Obama’s emerging anti-Isis strategy is an explicit forswearing of US ground combat forces in Iraq and Syria , although Obama has sent significant numbers of special operations “advisers” to Iraq.
  • (6) His February confirmation hearing featured Brennan having to forswear internal knowledge of torture; insisting, contrary to contemporaries’ recollections, that he attempted to stop it; and pledging to work with the committee on a torture report he said he had not fully read.
  • (7) Who can imagine Israel, India, Pakistan or Iran forswearing nuclear ambitions because we have done so?