What's the difference between affable and genteel?

Affable


Definition:

  • (a.) Easy to be spoken to or addressed; receiving others kindly and conversing with them in a free and friendly manner; courteous; sociable.
  • (a.) Gracious; mild; benign.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The claim has stunned a community who knew him not as a pale spectre in Taliban videos but as the tall, affable young man who served coffee and deftly fended off jokes about Billy Elliot – he did ballet along with karate, fencing, paragliding and mountain biking.
  • (2) He is affable but hyperactive, or maybe he has consumed too much white powder.
  • (3) As a businessman I had an obligation.” He also contrasted his alleged affability with Clinton’s remark during the first Democratic debate that she viewed Republicans as “an enemy”.
  • (4) When he appeared on Desert Island Discs, for example, Kirsty Young expressed surprise that he was so affable and giving, wondering aloud why she might have thought otherwise.
  • (5) Musk has a reputation for being prickly but when I meet him at SpaceX , his headquarters west of Los Angeles, he is affable and chatty, cheerfully expounding on space exploration, climate change, Richard Branson and Hollywood.
  • (6) His decisiveness and affability were valuable assets, but much more than this, he was one of the few who sought both to understand and to explain what was happening.
  • (7) It turns up at quarter to ten, deposited by an affable chap in a uniform.
  • (8) Lucky Richard was assigned to Poke ’s most affable hosts, the restaurant critic Tracey MacLeod and her colleague, the rapper LL Cool J , who plied him with fudge and polystyrene all day, while I was understandably ignored by my master, a capable young comic newspaper columnist called Michael Andrew Gove.
  • (9) Talha Asmal, 17, from Dewsbury, West Yorkshire , who reportedly detonated a vehicle fitted with explosives while fighting for the militant group in Iraq, was described as “a loving, kind, caring and affable teenager” by his devastated family.
  • (10) Speaking after the event, which was not open to journalists, the shareholder described Grade as "affable", but questioned whether he had delivered for investors.
  • (11) But in the meantime, they can continue to muddle along as they are: affable, a bit posh and fine with it.
  • (12) It's all the fault of that blasted weather, of course, but the affable Stan Wawrinka isn't happy, the Swiss taking aim at the tournament organisers for messing up his schedule, making him play a possible five matches in seven days and potentially wrecking his hopes of adding to the Australian Open he won in January.
  • (13) He was bright, intrepid, determined and full of character ... A very talented footballer and magnificent marine he had a lot to be proud of, yet I knew him to be an affable, generous, loyal and modest young man."
  • (14) Rwanda has a flourishing economy and well-oiled PR machine, and the affable Kagame uses that most democratic of media, Twitter .
  • (15) Some people have encountered an affable man with a beard and a hat.
  • (16) Boehner was referring to a Wall Street Journal report quoting an unnamed "senior administration official" as saying: “We are winning…It doesn’t really matter to us” how long the shutdown lasts “because what matters is the end result.” Boehner says he's known for his affable demeanor and fair-mindedness.
  • (17) By contrast it was the outwardly affable Harold Macmillan who pulled off a gruesome "night of the long knives", ditching a third of his cabinet overnight in an exercise named after Hitler's rather bloodier dispatching of his own lieutenants in the SA.
  • (18) Its affable 79-year-old owner, Salome Gutiérrez, has extended Del Bravo to include a Tejas y su Musica (The Texas Music Museum) honouring Lydia and other local artists.
  • (19) If Obama can get his proposals through Congress, the affable economist will have a lasting memorial in the Volcker Rule.
  • (20) He described O'Brien as a "very affable, warm and hospitable" man who was always unafraid to speak his mind.

Genteel


Definition:

  • (a.) Possessing or exhibiting the qualities popularly regarded as belonging to high birth and breeding; free from vulgarity, or lowness of taste or behavior; adapted to a refined or cultivated taste; polite; well-bred; as, genteel company, manners, address.
  • (a.) Graceful in mien or form; elegant in appearance, dress, or manner; as, the lady has a genteel person. Law.
  • (a.) Suited to the position of lady or a gentleman; as, to live in a genteel allowance.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Cleeve Hill was once the site of a 'bawdy' racecourse, before it was moved down the hill into genteel Cheltenham.
  • (2) While the opening tranche of "tales" derive from the work of forgotten contemporary humorists, the pieces of London reportage that he began to contribute to the Morning Chronicle in autumn 1834 ("Gin Shops", "Shabby-Genteel People", "The Pawnbroker's Shop") are like nothing else in pre-Victorian journalism: bantering and hard-headed by turns, hectic and profuse, falling over themselves to convey every last detail of the metropolitan front-line from which Dickens sent back his dispatches.
  • (3) An hour north of Paris in genteel Chantilly, England have prepared in unusually low-key fashion two years after a humiliating World Cup in which they were sent packing after two matches.
  • (4) Gustave's beatific smile and genteel demeanour work harmoniously with the purple hotel uniforms (Anderson does love a man in uniform).
  • (5) How popular would "Boris Island" – the mayor's fantasy airport in the Thames estuary – be in Clacton and genteel Frinton?
  • (6) From the late 1950s to the 1970s, the new, subsidised British drama was making waves at the Royal Court Theatre and in the regions - and finding critical support from commentators weary of the genteel West End theatre.
  • (7) Last week, the UK Statistics Authority gave him a reprimand that broke from the genteel language of the civil service.
  • (8) They signed Bush expressly as the first major British female exponent of this genteel genre.
  • (9) It is another to be given a genteel kicking by David Hare (who wrote in this newspaper last week that the Labour leader was worse than Neil Kinnock).
  • (10) Today Paris is still the different cities encapsulated by Hugo and Manet; Manet's chic Left Bank haunts are as fashionable and relatively genteel as 150 years ago.
  • (11) The wild, unstable undercliff on the Dorset-Devon border provided John Fowles with the perfect landscape to contrast with the genteel world of Lyme Regis in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (“In summer it is the nearest this country can offer to a tropical jungle”).
  • (12) This being a story about powerful, litigious people, it was composed in befittingly genteel terms; the pair are described as having a "friendship".
  • (13) It's a sleepy little town, beloved by genteel visitors who come for its microclimate – said to be 3C warmer than the rest of France – and exotic gardens.
  • (14) Norbert Smith: A Life was a brilliant satirical one-off on the history of British cinema through the eyes of a genteel luvvie who had seen it all, from 30s Will Hay comedies through to swinging 60s thrillers.
  • (15) There, his mother, in her mid-30s, dressed in a spotless white blouse, and with a Lady Diana-like haircut, was reading a newspaper and sipping from a genteel white teacup.
  • (16) She was born Muriel Camberg to a Jewish engineer father and an English, music-teacher mother, in the genteel Edinburgh inner suburb of Bruntsfield.
  • (17) But in the summer of 1983 this genteel corner, bypassed by shoppers and tourists, found itself a focus of national interest.
  • (18) An acrimonious divorce, scandal over a young model and nude photos at pool parties – Silvio Berlusconi's family traumas might not seem the ideal backdrop for the genteel spouses' programme at a G8 summit.
  • (19) And the genteel visitors who first inspected it had no means of knowing that even as expert an anatomist as Stubbs had got some details wrong.
  • (20) In the genteel, cultivated and fashionable crowd, Manet painted himself and his friends: the poets Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier, and composer Jacques Offenbach.