(v. t.) To put to a wrong use; to misapply; to misuse; to put to a bad use; to use for a wrong purpose or end; to pervert; as, to abuse inherited gold; to make an excessive use of; as, to abuse one's authority.
(v. t.) To use ill; to maltreat; to act injuriously to; to punish or to tax excessively; to hurt; as, to abuse prisoners, to abuse one's powers, one's patience.
(v. t.) To revile; to reproach coarsely; to disparage.
(v. t.) To dishonor.
(v. t.) To violate; to ravish.
(v. t.) To deceive; to impose on.
(v. t.) Improper treatment or use; application to a wrong or bad purpose; misuse; as, an abuse of our natural powers; an abuse of civil rights, or of privileges or advantages; an abuse of language.
(v. t.) Physical ill treatment; injury.
(v. t.) A corrupt practice or custom; offense; crime; fault; as, the abuses in the civil service.
(v. t.) Violation; rape; as, abuse of a female child.
Example Sentences:
(1) Unfortunately, due to confidentiality clauses that have been imposed on us by the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, we are unable to provide our full names and … titles … However, we believe the evidence that will be submitted will validate the statements that we are making in this submission.” The submission detailed specific allegations – including names and dates – of sexual abuse of child detainees, violence and bullying of children, suicide attempts by children and medical neglect.
(2) The authors empirically studied the self-medication hypothesis of drug abuse by examining drug effects and motivation for drug use in 494 hospitalized drug abusers.
(3) Alcohol abuse remains the predominant cause of chronic liver disease in the Western world.
(4) With respect to family environment, a history of sexual abuse was associated with perceptions that families of origin had less cohesion, more conflict, less emphasis on moral-religious matters, less emphasis on achievement, and less of an orientation towards intellectual, cultural, and recreational pursuits.
(5) An official inquiry into the Rotherham abuse scandal blamed failings by Rotherham council and South Yorkshire police.
(6) Former detectives had dug out damning evidence of abuse, as well as testimony from officers recommending prosecution, sources said.
(7) After these two experimental years, a governmental institute for prevention of child abuse and neglect was organized.
(8) Stringer, a Vietnam war veteran who was knighted in 1999, is already inside the corporation, if only for a few months, after he was appointed as one of its non-executive directors to toughen up the BBC's governance following a string of scandals, from the Jimmy Savile abuse to multimillion-pound executive payoffs.
(9) History contains numerous examples of government secrecy breeding abuse.
(10) This preliminary study compared the level of ego development, as measured by Loevinger's Washington University Sentence Completion Test (SCT), of 30 women with histories of childhood sexual victimization, and 30 women with no history of abuse.
(11) The District became a byword for crime and drug abuse, while its “mayor for life” lived high on the hog and lurched cheerfully from one scandal to the next.
(12) An official from Cafcass, the children and family court advisory service, tried to persuade the child in several interviews, but eventually the official told the court that further persuasion was inappropriate and essentially abusive.
(13) A series of hierarchical multiple regressions revealed the effects of Surgency, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Intellect on evoking upset in spouses through condescension (e.g., treating spouse as stupid or inferior), possessiveness (demanding too much time and attention), abuse (slapping spouse), unfaithfulness (having sex with others), inconsiderateness (leaving toilet seat up), moodiness (crying a lot), alcohol abuse (drinking too much alcohol), emotional constriction (hiding emotions to act tough), and self-centeredness (acting selfishly).
(14) Its abuse has become concentrated among post-high school age, black males in a limited number of cities, especially Washington, DC.
(15) From a clinical standpoint, it is clear that psychiatrists caring for anxious patients must be aware of the possibility of secondary alcohol abuse.
(16) A thorough nursing assessment is essential to detect and correct drug misuse and to diagnose drug abuse.
(17) Substantial percentages of both physicians and medical students reported access to drugs, family histories of substance abuse, stress at work and home, emotional problems, and sensation seeking.
(18) Subjects with past history of chronic substance abuse, neurologic disease, or focal findings on MRI or CT were excluded.
(19) And any Labour commitment on spending is fatally undermined by their deficit amnesia.” Davey widened the attack on the Tories, following a public row this week between Clegg and Theresa May over the “snooper’s charter”, by accusing his cabinet colleague Eric Pickles of coming close to abusing his powers by blocking new onshore developments against the wishes of some local councils.
(20) Again, the boys in care that he abused now speak to us as broken adults.
Nonsense
Definition:
(n.) That which is not sense, or has no sense; words, or language, which have no meaning, or which convey no intelligible ideas; absurdity.
(n.) Trifles; things of no importance.
Example Sentences:
(1) Virtually every developed country has some form of property tax, so the idea that valuing residential property is uniquely difficult, or that it would be widely evaded, is nonsense.
(2) To this end, a meiosis-defective mating-type mutation was used as a marker for the plus segment, by taking advantage of its suppressibility by a nonsense suppressor.
(3) Real ear CVRs, calculated from real ear recordings of nonsense syllables, were obtained from eight hearing-impaired listeners.
(4) The first paper of this series (Picheny, Durlach, & Braida, 1985) presented evidence that there are substantial intelligibility differences for hearing-impaired listeners between nonsense sentences spoken in a conversational manner and spoken with the effort to produce clear speech.
(5) These data suggest that yeast tyrosyl-tRNA synthetase interacts with positions 34 and 35 of the anticodon of tRNATyr and opens the possibility that nonsense suppressor efficiency may be mediated by the level of aminoacylation.
(6) But this no-nonsense venue, just 10km but a world away from parliament, is the latest stop in a national pro-renewables tour that is making the Abbott government decidedly uncomfortable.
(7) Free recall of nonsense syllables was significantly better when these were learned under active compound.
(8) "It is clear this is a government which is short of ideas, desperately trying to bring up nonsensical diversions to distract attention from the situation in the country.
(9) Four regA mutants (regA1, regA8, regA11, and regA15) failed to make a protein having a molecular weight of about 12,000, whereas mutant regA9 did make such a protein; regA15 produced a new, apparently smaller protein that was presumably a nonsense fragment, whereas regA11 produced a new, apparently larger protein.
(10) In the first, span and free-recall measures were obtained for 24 subjects, each tested with four types of spoken material (nonsense syllables, random words, fourth-order approximations to English, and normal prose).
(11) I’d have been a TV celeb type, done these albums that are nonsense – and yeah, with hindsight, that wouldn’t have been a bad idea.
(12) In addition, purified protein of 62,000 daltons, resulting from the suppression of the nonsense mutations tox-30 and tox-45, will react with antisera purified against the terminal 17,000 daltons of the toxin molecule and are immunologically identical to toxin by radial immunodiffusion.
(13) The other three carry nonsense mutations which inactivate both the excision repair and essential functions.
(14) La Manga in Spain is an example of human nonsense: 20km of city length, two kilometres wide, with huge buildings all along,” said Couet.
(15) In a sign of Labour's need to avoid tension with business, Darling was careful to stress he was not criticising the signatories but said: "I wonder if one of their finance directors came to them and said 'look, we have this wonderful idea, and we are going to pay with it by savings we have not yet identified and by calculations we cannot verify', they would say 'that is complete nonsense'."
(16) The mutation, which is not of the common CG-to-TG type, is at the same codon in which both nonsense and a different missense (Arg to Gln) have previously been observed.
(17) Introduction of an ochre nonsense codon into the reading frame of the leader peptide sequence leads to considerable reduction of the basal expression and loss of inducibility of the cat gene.
(18) On the Iraq war, he admitted he had voted in favour of military action in 2003 though he said he thought at the time that Blair's claims about weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were "nonsense".
(19) Two nonsense mutations at codon positions 33 and 187 and an aberrant splice site were found in the human gene.
(20) The studies on the reverse mutation of osm3 indicated that this osmotic-sensitivity arises from a missense or nonsense mutation in OSM3 locus.