What's the difference between astonish and startle?

Astonish


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To stun; to render senseless, as by a blow.
  • (v. t.) To strike with sudden fear, terror, or wonder; to amaze; to surprise greatly, as with something unaccountable; to confound with some sudden emotion or passion.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) It is my desperate hope that we close out of town.” In the book, God publishes his own 'It Getteth Better' video and clarifies his original writings on homosexuality: I remember dictating these lines to Moses; and afterward looking up to find him staring at me in wide-eyed astonishment, and saying, "Thou do knowest that when the Israelites read this, they're going to lose their fucking shit, right?"
  • (2) To a supporter at the last election like me – someone who spoke alongside Nick Clegg at the curtain-raiser event for the party conference during the height of Labour's onslaught on civil liberties, and was assured privately by two leaders that the party was onside about civil liberties – this breach of trust and denial of principle is astonishing.
  • (3) It's that he habitually abuses his position by lobbying ministers at all; I've heard from former ministers who were astonished by the speed with which their first missive from Charles arrived, opening with the phrase: "It really is appalling".
  • (4) Puskas, possessed of a left foot of astonishing power, and his team colleagues, Sandor Kocsis and Zoltan Czibor, all found their way to Spain.
  • (5) Results of venous thrombectomies are particularly astonishingly good in phlegmasia coerulea and it is therefore mandatory to transfer all fresh cases of thrombosis of the deep veins of the peelvis and lower extremities to an angiologic center in order to differentiate cases for fibrinolytic therapy, from those which require surgical intervention.
  • (6) FWA chairman Andy Dunn said: "Those members who have been fortunate enough to be working at a match involving Luis Suárez have witnessed an astonishing talent first-hand.
  • (7) Even Corbyn’s fiercest critics have to concede he has achieved something astonishing.
  • (8) Recently released figures from the Veterans Administration on the number of Vietnam veterans who have been granted service connection in their claims for post-traumatic stress disorder appear to be astonishingly low, given the publicity that the media and mental health professionals have placed on this diagnosis in recent years.
  • (9) It is, in fact, quite astonishing to find British housebuilders and planners going along with the design and construction of such decent new homes.
  • (10) Over the past year, they’ve been to five continents and discovered an astonishing world of insect flavour.
  • (11) "The memorable 1961 British Home Championship yielded an astonishing 40 goals from six matches," writes Erik Kennedy.
  • (12) The complication rate was astonishingly low during IUSC: being only 4.3% (2 male patients, one with stricture of the urethra and epididymitis, one with autonomous dysreflexia with bladder overdistension).
  • (13) He added: “In the context of very surprising populist electoral successes in the US it would be astonishing if the BBC didn’t interview her.
  • (14) So how did Vanity Fair decide to illustrate this heartfelt and rather astonishing interview?
  • (15) Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, said he would be astonished if the coalition had not enacted a lobbyists' register and a power to recall errant MPs by 2015.
  • (16) At one point, Hodge said she was astonished that the secretary of state had claimed that Stephens had approved Smith's role.
  • (17) Individualism – the assertion of every person’s claim to maximised private freedom and the unrestrained liberty to express autonomous desires … became the leftwing watchword of the hour.” The result was an astonishing liberation: from millennia of social, gender and sexual control by powerful, mostly elderly men.
  • (18) She is fantastically clever and when she's on about ideas she is astonishing.
  • (19) The kinetic data obtained using lysine-containing model peptides as substrates indicate an astonishing similarity to mammalian lysyloxidase.
  • (20) "We are a struggling small business and I am astonished that banks are allowed to get away with handling their accounts in this way.

Startle


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To move suddenly, or be excited, on feeling alarm; to start.
  • (v. t.) To excite by sudden alarm, surprise, or apprehension; to frighten suddenly and not seriously; to alarm; to surprise.
  • (v. t.) To deter; to cause to deviate.
  • (n.) A sudden motion or shock caused by an unexpected alarm, surprise, or apprehension of danger.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) These later results suggest that dopamine agonists increase sensorimotor reactivity measured with acoustic startle by acting on sensory rather than motor parts of the reflex arc.
  • (2) The hypothesis that the standard acoustic startle habituation paradigm contains the elements of Pavlovian fear conditioning was tested.
  • (3) But that promise was beginning to startle the markets, which admire Monti’s appetite for austerity and fear the free spending and anti-European views of some Italian politicians.
  • (4) Both startle amplitude and onset latency showed significantly greater facilitation in the preschool children than in the 8-year-olds and adults.
  • (5) flexion, stretch, rolling, startle, jumping (stepping), and writhing.
  • (6) Three response patterns were scored: (1) no startle, (2) startle without response decrement, and (3) response decrement by 12 stimuli.
  • (7) More importantly, motor and cardiovascular responses to startle may be separated through discrimination of afferent stimuli suggesting either differences in neural pathways for acoustic and tactile stimuli or a differential dependency of the various responses on stimulus characteristics.
  • (8) The startle-elicited increase in blood pressure was significantly elevated in SHRs and at the same time the acoustic startle response was depressed as compared to WKY rats.
  • (9) A placebo effect could not definitely be ruled out, but the startling changes seen in patients who had been followed for years with other forms of therapy suggest strongly that this improvement was genuine.
  • (10) In general, conditions that affect the amplitude of the acoustic startle reflex similarly influence the disruptive effect of a noise burst on motor performance, but the two measures are not correlated in the detail necessary to suggest a causative relationship.
  • (11) The results are compared to other drugs known to affect the startle reflex.
  • (12) In awake rats the latency of auditory startle recorded electromyographically in the neck is about 5 ms, suggesting that the primary component of this brainstem reflex is mediated by a neural circuit with only a few synapses.
  • (13) A series of seven experiments related amplitude and latency of the pigeon's startle response, elicited by an intense visual stimulus, to antecedent auditory and visual events in the sensory environment.
  • (14) The acoustic startle response (ASR) of male rats was measured during several sessions over a 24-hr period in both a light-dark cycle and a constant-dark condition.
  • (15) That dramatically shifts the focus back to us, the programme makers, to come up with more, new, startling ideas, absolutely unmissable storylines and settings, the sharpest writing.
  • (16) Because ammocoetes are burrowing filter feeders, this startle behavior results in rapid withdrawal of the head into the burrow.
  • (17) Startle was indexed by the eyeblink, which was measured by vertical electro-oculography.
  • (18) In the present work no significant differences were found between the behaviour of FG7142-kindled rats and vehicle-treated controls in social interaction test, elevated plus maze, or the Vogel conflict test of anxiety or in tests of home cage aggression or startle responses.
  • (19) The first attempted to determine a sonic boom level below which startle would not occurr.
  • (20) It is able to (1) sample startle responses from 5 animals simultaneously during a specific time band after the eliciting stimulus; (2) convert the analogue startle amplitudes into 2-digit numbers; (3) print the digital results of each startle in each animal; (4) add up the startle amplitudes for each rat over a preset number of stimuli and print the totals; (5) print the interstimulus interval and (6) code for up to six diferent types of trials.