What's the difference between abjure and recant?

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.

Recant


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To withdraw or repudiate formally and publicly (opinions formerly expressed); to contradict, as a former declaration; to take back openly; to retract; to recall.
  • (v. i.) To revoke a declaration or proposition; to unsay what has been said; to retract; as, convince me that I am wrong, and I will recant.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The prime minister made an unscheduled statement on Tuesday morning from behind a lectern outside 10 Downing Street, in which she recanted her repeated promise not to go to the polls before 2020.
  • (2) The hordes poured in to defend her, the story went global and by lunchtime on Friday the leader of the council was having to recant and apologise, live on BBC Radio 4.
  • (3) My article for the Forest Journal, robustly supporting the chancellor’s earlier policy, is already with the printer … Having been persuaded of the correctness of the course that the chancellor is now following, I merely needed an opportunity to recant.” Philip Hammond’s letter Ann-Marie Trevelyan, a backbench MP who had raised concerns about the NICs rise, told the Guardian she welcomed the chancellor’s change of heart: “My leaflets had ‘no tax rises’ on them.
  • (4) One explicitly said he sought no recantation of past remarks nor a change of position on Israel, just reassurance that "you won't put us through another four years of this".
  • (5) The experience with zomepirac (Zomax) and the unexpected incidence of severe anaphylactic reactions is recanted as an unfortunate illustrated example that has served to upgrade the adverse reaction reporting process.
  • (6) Though Berger never specifically recanted, he did later admit that Ways of Seeing was too rushed and crude, and that he had not allowed for the genius factor.
  • (7) Referring to the two hadith in which Muhammad reportedly condemns apostasy as a capital offence, Maher Hathout , author of In Pursuit of Justice: The Jurisprudence of Human Rights in Islam writes: "both of them contradict the Qur'an and other instances in which the Prophet did not compel anyone to embrace Islam, nor punish them if they recanted."
  • (8) Anders also said that on 2 May Sterling met Stiviano at the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills – just before she recorded an interview with ABC's Barbara Walters – and asked her to recant statements about the tape's authenticity and confess to doctoring it.
  • (9) Mal Brough has categorically denied asking Peter Slipper’s former staffer to procure copies of the Speaker’s diary for him, recanting an admission he apparently made during a 60 Minutes interview last year.
  • (10) Instead, Flint professed her loyalty, only to recant 18 hours later, while Hutton insisted his departure was personal and that he wanted Brown to stay in post.
  • (11) As a former prosecutor herself, Gold said it is tough to bring charges when a witness recants, even though it is possible to bring a case to trial when there is no witness prepared to testify.
  • (12) He later recanted the position on reducing Asian immigration.
  • (13) There were no breast-beating recantations but, according to Dawidoff, "he still [had] reservations about how far afield he took country music from the relatively unadorned prewar downhome sound."
  • (14) In an interview on the 7.30 program, the independent senator Andrew Wilkie said Garrett’s recanting of the story “beggars belief”.
  • (15) Instead of defending her position, Penny caved, recanted, and commented mournfully that "having your privilege checked" was painful.
  • (16) • Five doctors were coerced by the Sri Lankan government to recant on casualty figures they gave to journalists in the last months of island's brutal civil war.
  • (17) William Sweeney, the FBI’s assistant director in New York, said on Monday that the FBI had got a report of a domestic incident involving Rahami some time ago, but the allegations had been recanted, and “there’s nothing to indicate that currently he was on our radar”.
  • (18) The change in the tide was obvious when arch-Blairite Peter Mandelson went on television to recant.
  • (19) It would recant the illiberal legacy of Labour home secretaries, of Charles Clarke , Jack Straw and Jacqui Smith , and reassert individual rights against the surveillance state.
  • (20) Nick Herbert, the Tory MP who chaired his party’s remain campaign, wrote in the Guardian that anyone warning against hard Brexit was branded as “heretics who must recant and swear adherence to the new faith”.