(n.) A comprehensive maxim or principle expressed in a few words; a sharply defined sentence relating to abstract truth rather than to practical matters.
Example Sentences:
(1) For the man who created the " specialist in failure " aphorism to disparage a fellow manager, it is obvious how much that would hurt.
(2) His most celebrated aphorism was his response to a journalist who wondered whether Christian Democrats would ever be weary of wielding power: "Political power wears out only those who haven't got it."
(3) She is thinking about a book of aphorisms, for which Spark characters such as Mrs Hawkins and Miss Jean Brodie are famous.
(4) His aphorisms include the following: "may your food be your medicine".
(5) When we sit down for a more formal interview in his Manhattan hotel room a few hours later, Ross's earlier gregarious anecdotes are replaced by aphorisms that could come straight off one of those inspirational posters you see in recruitment consultant offices.
(6) I just thought up a nonsensical Confucian-sounding aphorism and said it in a grossly exaggerated version of my dad's voice.
(7) Greg Dyke must put plug in Qatar talk if Fifa revamp is to unite the world | Barney Ronay Read more Like Blatter, Dyke can lapse into mystifyingly abstract aphorisms.
(8) One cheering side-effect of economic depression, is that it provides occasion to recall Keynes's sideline in Wildean aphorisms.
(9) Vidal's critics disparaged his tendency to formulate an aphorism rather than to argue, finding in his work an underlying note of contempt for those who did not agree with him.
(10) It's an aphorism the ex-head of the civil service proved wrong.
(11) Much of that is down to Dupuis who, in a genre where bland aphorisms are often the norm, actually has something to say.
(12) Twain was always a barometric writer, with a knack for registering contemporary social pressures in sharp-eyed aphorisms that weren't merely quotable, but often well ahead of their time.
(13) The old aphorism is still valid: When in doubt, take it out.
(14) Which in turn helps partially to explain the significance of the aphorism: 'An Argentine is an Italian who speaks Spanish and thinks he is an Englishman.'
(15) Now they are the stalest of cliches, but when, in the first 1998 episode, in the midst of all that big hair and weird brown lipstick, you hear Carrie first describe the allure and disappointment of "toxic bachelors", when Samantha first says frankly that she likes to have sex without emotion, to "fuck like a man", it was bitingly fresh for women to speak these aphorisms out loud, in public, and in fabulous heels.
(16) Elizabeth is prone to blurting out aphorisms, such as "it's easier to give a blow job than make coffee" and "you should be just as happy with the breasts you have as you are with the futility of existence".
(17) In its submission to the special session, Colombia quotes Albert Einstein’s aphorism that the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”.
(18) Aphorisms often appear too trite to tell us anything meaningful, yet this is not the case with the assertion attributed to Mahatma Gandhi that "the true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members".
(19) The files disclose that Thatcher's first months in power reveal a torrent of pungent political aphorisms that were to sustain her in power for the next 13 years.
(20) It was a favourite Reagan aphorism, sometimes half-true, sometimes a disastrous basis for policy in a globally connected, ever more sophisticated world.
Sententious
Definition:
(a.) Abounding with sentences, axioms, and maxims; full of meaning; terse and energetic in expression; pithy; as, a sententious style or discourse; sententious truth.
(a.) Comprising or representing sentences; sentential.
Example Sentences:
(1) This study provides normative data for teenagers' performance on tests of time-compressed sentential material.
(2) Consistent with previous reports of normative data at other age levels, performance became poorer for 0 to either 40 or 60% TC (there was a negligible difference between the latter), was better for normal sentences than for sentential approximations, and improved slightly in the higher grades.
(3) Stimuli that were syntactically structured and contained a sentencelike rhythm were spoken with shorter durations than nonsyntactic stimuli with sentential rhythm but only by 8-year-olds and adults.
(4) Both samples of disabled readers appeared able to use syntactic information as an independent source of sentential information in reading, even the sample whose reading disability was associated with oral syntax deficits.
(5) The appropriateness of using a picture description task which involves a perceptual step-by-step account of unrelated events to assess sentential semantics and the conveying of information at a conceptual level is discussed.
(6) In an initial paper on this topic (Rips, 1989), I proposed a model for a subset of such problems that depend on sentential reasoning.
(7) Ability of eight good and eight poor readers (in Grade 1, ages ranging from 6.7 to 7.4 yr.) to discriminate phonemic contrasts presented in 50% time-compressed sentential stimuli (Subtest 13 of the Carrow-Auditory Visual Abilities Test) was measured.
(8) The latter findings suggest, respectively, that the semantic features of sentence subjects are of minimal relevance to the syntactic and morphological processes that implement agreement, and that agreement features are specified at a point in processing where the eventual length of sentential constituents has little effect on syntactic planning.
(9) The Hoppe-Bogen finding of alexithymia in 12 commissurotomy patients is examined, using 6 sentential-level items corresponding to 6 of the 8 key alexithymia items in the Beth Israel 'Psychosomatic Questionnaire'.
(10) The results suggest that native signers process lexical structural automatically, such that they can attend to and remember lexical and sentential meaning.
(11) This study compared the performance of normal-reading and reading-impaired children using time-compressed three- and five-word sentential approximations to full grammaticality, and the Word Intelligibility by Picture Identification (WIPI) test presented with and without pictures.
(12) 25 4-word, first, and second-order sentential approximations were presented to 18 aphasic and 18 normal children.
(13) This suggests that the presence of sentential context allows listeners to factor out the influence of phrase-final lengthening on vowel duration and to more accurately interpret this cue to voicing of the final fricative.
(14) Their account posits five processing strategies tailored to this problem domain and a mechanism for evaluating sentential arguments based on mental models.
(15) His solemnity and sententiousness are much better, much funnier, coming from someone so "young".
(16) The results show that sentential contexts do not preselect a set of contextually appropriate words before any sensory information about the spoken word is available.
(17) The present results suggest some disturbance in the patients' ability to manipulate fundamental frequency across sentential domains.
(18) This study measured the ability of 16 aged listeners, normal for their age (age range, 63 to 84 yr.) to discriminate phonemic contrasts in sentential stimuli (Subtest 13 of the Carrow-Auditory Visual Abilities Test) presented at 50% time-compression rate.
(19) Productions of phonemic stress tokens (e.g., Re'dcoat vs. red coa't) as well as examples of contrastive stress, or sentential emphasis (e.g., Sam hated the movie), were elicited from eight male speakers with unilateral right hemisphere CVAs and seven male control subjects.
(20) When Seb Coe stood up and said at the opening ceremony, before it all unfolded, that what he hoped for the Games was that "we will be able to tell our children and our grandchildren that we did it right", it sounded a bit sententious.