What's the difference between aphoristic and epigram?

Aphoristic


Definition:

  • (a.) Alt. of Aphoristical

Example Sentences:

  • (1) More than 2,000 years ago aphorist Publilius Syrus expressed precisely the same idea: "Debt is the slavery of the free", as did the Bible: "The rich rules over the poor and the borrower is the slave of the lender".
  • (2) Martin Amis, who has little time for Vidal the novelist, recognised the glory of the witty, learned, aphoristic essays.
  • (3) But that fine aphorist of late capitalism missed an efficiency saving.
  • (4) He writes in terse numbered paragraphs, following Nietzsche's aphoristic style.
  • (5) Is there anything else I can do to piss you off?” A picture of Obama with “Does this ass make my car look big?” The Republican style for 2016 is angry aphoristic humor.

Epigram


Definition:

  • (n.) A short poem treating concisely and pointedly of a single thought or event. The modern epigram is so contrived as to surprise the reader with a witticism or ingenious turn of thought, and is often satirical in character.
  • (n.) An effusion of wit; a bright thought tersely and sharply expressed, whether in verse or prose.
  • (n.) The style of the epigram.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) He has just released a new album, Epigrams and Interludes .
  • (2) Anna Karenina set out to be a tract against adultery in high society; "Vengeance is mine and I will repay," is the epigram on the novel's title page.
  • (3) "Bratza takes issue with the apparently resentful epigram coined by the late supreme court justice Lord Rodger: "Argentoratum locutum: iudicium finitum – Strasbourg has spoken, the case is closed".
  • (4) The play opens with a great comic tour de force as Lord Are attempts to have himself arranged by his servant in the manner of a Gainsborough painting so that he might appear at home in the countryside, all the time spouting epigrams worthy of Oscar Wilde: "A poem should be well cut and fit the page ... the secret of literary style lies in the margins."
  • (5) I don't know if the closing ceremony will quote those other indelible lines from Shakespeare's great valedictory play, The Tempest , to bookend the opening epigram, but you can't help feeling it should: "Our revels now are ended.
  • (6) On one level, we all know this stuff already - it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story.
  • (7) But these days, he is full of epigrams about looking on the bright side and some of his phrases feel as worn down as an ocean-tossed pebble, smoothed through years of repetition to reporters, his family, himself: "You get what you get and you don't get upset", "It is what it is."
  • (8) Stephen Galilee (@SjGalilee) I am supporting #australiansforcoal because anti-coal activists waste a lot of time entertaining themselves with smart arse tweets about it April 14, 2014 But maybe Galilee should remember the often-invoked Oscar Wilde epigram about publicity .
  • (9) Very often inscriptions--above all grave epigrams--with their great tradition from various times and localities provide many good examples of daily life including valuable references to the practice, ethics and social situation of physicians.
  • (10) But for a while he spoke only in lapidary epigrams.
  • (11) It should please those who prefer to have their clichés masquerading as epigrams."
  • (12) His own vocabulary and the heavily weighted emphasis of his speech is so embedded in public consciousness that it has become a comic style as recognisable as an epigram from Oscar Wilde or a line from one of his other literary heroes, PG Wodehouse.

Words possibly related to "aphoristic"