What's the difference between asinine and silly?

Asinine


Definition:

  • (a.) Of or belonging to, or having the qualities of, the ass, as stupidity and obstinacy.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) If only the prize itself could get away from its asinine "glittering occasion" presentation, it might yet be taken as seriously as it deserves to be - at least when it is awarded to projects like Accordia, a scheme that promises to transcend fads and fashion.
  • (2) I'd groan at gossip magazines, furious with the world's asinine obsession with celebrity, disappointed by women gazing doe-eyed at the camera with vulnerable, save-me expressions on their Botoxed faces.
  • (3) It is asinine because at every turn politicians have made worse the imbalance between demand and supply.
  • (4) Chris Grayling, to take an asinine example, claimed last week that the courts have been taken over by left-wing agitators.
  • (5) The thought came over me: am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness, the apathy and the hyperbolic and most asinine stupidity of these fat headed oafs and on compulsion assuming an air of kindness, patience and assiduity?
  • (6) These two isolates appear prototypic of two previously unrecorded herpesviruses for which the names asinine herpesvirus 2 and 3 are suggested for the betaherpesvirus and the alphaherpesvirus respectively.
  • (7) As he rhetorically asked: "Can anyone seriously believe the dispute would have gone global, or that the British government would have made its asinine threat to suspend the Ecuadorean embassy's diplomatic status and enter it by force, or that scores of police would have surrounded the building, swarming up and down the fire escape and guarding every window, if it was all about one man wanted for questioning over sex crime allegations in Stockholm?"
  • (8) The S. schenckii has been described in São Paulo, Brazil, in canines, felines, asinines, bovines, equines and murines.
  • (9) The sad truth is that housing policy in Britain is asinine and cowardly.
  • (10) Stewart’s impersonation had ripple effects, including the imagining of the real-estate developer’s minions during his asinine quest to reveal President Obama’s “true birth certificate” , but Stewart was never funnier than when he channeled Trump himself, razzing him for taking Sarah Palin out for a less-than-true New York slice of pizza .
  • (11) Having read (and loved) her first two books , I would have considered Lewycka an unlikely candidate to pen such an asinine attack on the stock market – which made it all the more disappointing to see what poison flowed from her pen.
  • (12) Not to be outdone, the endlessly asinine “explanatory journalism” site Vox informed us that “ If the supercontinent Pangaea spontaneously reunited, the US would border the Ebola epidemic”.
  • (13) For a year now, pollsters, the media and the world at large have been baffled by the fact that no incendiary or asinine thing Trump says or tweets seems to make any dent in his appeal.
  • (14) A panel of 14 monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) was used to characterize the high abundance glycoproteins of equine herpesviruses 4 (EHV-4) and 1 (EHV-1), and asinine herpesvirus 3 (AHV-3).
  • (15) There is not much he can do about the asinine point-scoring style; one can only hope that at some point the frontbenches start to realise how much damage they're doing to themselves, never mind to politics generally.
  • (16) In comparison with the horse, the asinine nasopharynx is markedly constricted in its middle part and the laryngeal airway has a more acute angulation relative to the nasopharynx.
  • (17) Of all the asinine interventions made by the English establishment in the Polanski affair, this was the worst.
  • (18) Proteins of purified virions of equine herpesvirus 4 (EHV-4; equine rhinopneumonitis), EHV-1 (equine abortion virus) and asinine herpesvirus 3 (AHV-3) were compared by metabolic labelling with [35S]methionine or [14C]glucosamine during growth of low passage virus in natural host cells (horse or donkey) and high passage virus in an appropriate cell line and analysis by SDS-PAGE.
  • (19) Lastly, it was asinine not to understand that private capital demands financial returns well above the cost of capital available to the low-risk state.
  • (20) Elena V (@amariselv) @HunterFelt I will not refrain from expressing my thoughts about pitchers hitting: It's asinine.

Silly


Definition:

  • (n.) Happy; fortunate; blessed.
  • (n.) Harmless; innocent; inoffensive.
  • (n.) Weak; helpless; frail.
  • (n.) Rustic; plain; simple; humble.
  • (n.) Weak in intellect; destitute of ordinary strength of mind; foolish; witless; simple; as, a silly woman.
  • (n.) Proceeding from want of understanding or common judgment; characterized by weakness or folly; unwise; absurd; stupid; as, silly conduct; a silly question.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) We just hope that … maybe she’s gone to see her friend, talk some sense into her,” Renu said, adding that Shamima “knew that it was a silly thing to do” and that she did not know why her friend had done it.
  • (2) And Myers is cautioned after a silly block 3.21am GMT 54 mins Besler with a long-throw for SKC but it's cleared.
  • (3) As if to prove her silly dilettantism, when a journalist asked Dasha about her favourite artists, she replied, "I'm, like, really bad at remembering names."
  • (4) Some of them, pulled together for the manifesto, are silly, or doomed, or simply there for shock value - information points in the form of holograms of Dixon of Dock Green, the legalisation of soft drugs, official brothels opposite Westminster, complete with division bells.
  • (5) I am of a similar vintage and, like many friends and fans of the series, bemoan the fact that we are generally treated by society as silly, weak, daft, soppy, prejudiced (even bigoted), risk-averse and wary of new situations.
  • (6) I had more fun with Matt Winning , delivering a silly set on the Free Fringe imagining himself the son of Robert Mugabe.
  • (7) Facebook Twitter Pinterest In an essay for the Hollywood Reporter, Camille Paglia writes that Swift promotes a ‘silly, regressive public image’.
  • (8) His selection on Twitter, he added, was “all in no particular order, off the top of my head, and the most incomplete of lists”, put together in response to Talese’s “silliness”.
  • (9) As soon as they saw how serious it was, they switched from being my silly, fun friends into being the most reliable and amazing people.
  • (10) They were all young, and it was a party house, devoted to games of hide and seek, music, silly practical jokes and food fights in the drawing room.
  • (11) As a result, one or two wrote some rather silly things in their reports,” Wilshaw said.
  • (12) ‘Silly things said by a silly man’ To be honest I really don’t care what BoJo says.
  • (13) People usually don't make silly, careless mistakes when they're motivated and working in a positive environment.
  • (14) Watching “our lads” pretending to mouth questionable lyrics about God giving the Queen near-immortal life, and her being the victor when she’s not really of fighting age, is silly.
  • (15) Imagine my relief this week then, when I found out that I can now let go of all my silly gay politics.
  • (16) We have referees who are unfamiliar with that silly "Goaltender Interference" technicality.
  • (17) The syndrome he described--a psychosis of early onset with a deteriorating course characterized by a "silly" affect, behavioral peculiarities, and formal thought disorder--not only adumbrated Kraepelin's generic category of dementia praecox but quite specifically defined the later subtype of hebephrenic, or disorganized, schizophrenia as well.
  • (18) "But they're so silly that I must say I never found them intimidating."
  • (19) Just as certain songs become inextricably associated in our minds with certain eras (before the invention of iPods, that is, after which everyone could walk around every day with all the songs in the world on shuffle), so too do silly trends.
  • (20) In 2014, she began working as a writer at Late Night with Seth Meyers; her first standup spot on that show began with a joke that typified both her silliness and confidence.