What's the difference between austerity and penance?

Austerity


Definition:

  • (n.) Sourness and harshness to the taste.
  • (n.) Severity of manners or life; extreme rigor or strictness; harsh discipline.
  • (n.) Plainness; freedom from adornment; severe simplicity.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Since the start of this week, markets have been more cautious, with bond yields in Spain reaching their highest levels in four months on Tuesday amid concern about the scale of the austerity measures being imposed by the government and fears that the country might need a bailout.
  • (2) In a separate exclusive interview , Alexis Tsipras, the increasingly powerful 37-year-old Greek politician now regarded by many as holding the future of the euro in his hands, told the Guardian that he was determined "to stop the experiment" with austerity policies imposed by Germany.
  • (3) He campaigned for a no vote and won handsomely, backed by more than 61%, before performing a striking U-turn on Thursday night, re-tabling the same austerity terms he had campaigned to defeat and which the voters rejected.
  • (4) 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.
  • (5) Cable argued that the additional £30bn austerity proposed by the chancellor after 2015 went beyond the joint coalition commitment to eradicate the structural part of the UK's current budget deficit – the part of non-investment spending that will not disappear even when the economy has fully emerged from the recession of 2008-09.
  • (6) All of the parties have been trying to use Greece to their advantage.” On Monday, the governing People’s party pointed to the referendum to justify their decision to impose austerity measures during the height of the economic crisis.
  • (7) Greece sincerely had no intention of clashing with its partners, Varoufakis insisted, but the logic of austerity was such that policies conducted in its embrace could only fail.
  • (8) As Greece pleads with its eurozone creditors for more time in meeting its fiscal adjustment targets, Dombrovskis is a fierce champion of surgical austerity applied quickly and ruthlessly.
  • (9) Updated at 12.23pm BST 12.04pm BST As Mariano Rajoy and François Hollande prepare to reveal their austerity budgets (Spain goes on Thursday and France on Friday), they might be forgiven for casting an envious eye towards Australia where government statisticians revealed that the country is A$325bn (£200bn) better off than they'd thought.
  • (10) This proposal is a purely partisan move that will backfire on the government disastrously.” The Green party accused Osborne of making “efforts to limit the democratic scrutiny of his austerity agenda”.
  • (11) The budget red book contained a chart which suggested that the rich were indeed facing a bigger hit than anyone else, and Liberal Democrats were today pointing to this to justify the austerity package.
  • (12) "But if public opposition to further austerity measures hardens, the Greek government could find it even tougher to put the public finances back on a sustainable footing."
  • (13) The austerity programmes administered by western governments in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis were, of course, intended as a remedy, a tough but necessary course of treatment to relieve the symptoms of debts and deficits and to cure recession.
  • (14) In the midst of this catastrophe, the troika is insisting on further austerity to achieve massive primary budget surpluses of 3% in 2015, 4.5% in 2016 and even more in future years.
  • (15) In a Europe (including Britain) where austerity has become the economic dogma of the elite in spite of massive evidence that it is choking growth and worsening the very sickness it claims to heal, there are plenty of rational, sensible arguments for taking to the streets.
  • (16) The Attlee government was toppled by peacetime austerity that voters no longer trusted.
  • (17) After heading for Rome with his long-term partner, Howard Auster, he returned to fiction with a bestselling novel, Julian, based on the life of a late Roman emperor; a political novel, Washington DC, based on his own family; and Myra Breckinridge, a subversive satire that examined contradictions of gender and sexuality with enough comic brio to become a worldwide bestseller.
  • (18) Yesterday, John McDonnell spelled out the new Labour leadership’s public investment-driven economic alternative to austerity.
  • (19) Then Greece has another chance.” But the intervention by the IMF will undermine EU leaders who argue Greece must submit to a fresh round of austerity measures to release funds for debt repayments.
  • (20) The IMF itself came under fire after it admitted in its World Economic Outlook report that officials had underestimated the effects of austerity measures on economic growth.

Penance


Definition:

  • (n.) Repentance.
  • (n.) Pain; sorrow; suffering.
  • (n.) A means of repairing a sin committed, and obtaining pardon for it, consisting partly in the performance of expiatory rites, partly in voluntary submission to a punishment corresponding to the transgression. Penance is the fourth of seven sacraments in the Roman Catholic Church.
  • (v. t.) To impose penance; to punish.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) "Great Yuletide fun on ITV now: hilarious reparations as Dannii Minogue performs a selection of the biblical world's most hideous acts of penance in front of a panel of witheringly critical bisexual judges."
  • (2) The Vatican ordered O'Brien to undertake an unspecified period of "prayer and penance".
  • (3) The girls know they are expected to show a certain degree of penance.
  • (4) So next Sunday, he's going to murder blameless Father James as an enforced act of penance.
  • (5) On the contrary, I could name many ( many ) celebrities who I'd love to see forced into doing charity work and "giving back", as a penance for being smug, over-rewarded, self-obsessed wastes of space.
  • (6) In 2010, Admiral William McRaven, then the head of the Joint Special Operations Command, slaughtered a sheep in penance to a family that saw its members mistakenly killed by McRaven’s forces.
  • (7) The cardinal's resignation and removal from Scotland for six months of prayer and penance had cast doubt over an inquiry.
  • (8) But Harold Wilson, offended by a speech in which I had attacked the public schools, exiled me to the Foreign Office to do penance as minister of state.
  • (9) No longer obliged to play nice – as they did in the early hours of Wednesday morning, when they agreed to release €10.3bn in bailout money for Athens – they’d now be able to revive their demand that Greece live on ever more meagre rations in penance for its huge debts.
  • (10) The proposition also galvanized a generation of Latino politicians with long memories, who have effectively created a sanctuary state in California in subsequent years – offering driver’s licenses to folks without papers, providing in-state tuition for undocumented college students, officially telling la migra to butt out of state affairs – as penance for the sins of their predecessors.
  • (11) Though John’s midweek surgery leaves him sidelined for the season, Díaz has been working towards full fitness while Castillo has paid penance and was back in Pareja’s team for Sunday’s kickoff.
  • (12) The common understanding of prison is that it is a place of deprivation and penance rather than domestic comfort.
  • (13) Manchester United have got into the habit of treating their lopsided Premier League programme as a penance.
  • (14) But that old model is irreparably broken: the supermarket giant revealed last week that group pre-tax profits for the first six months of this year were almost completely wiped out by penance for past accounting sins and the collapsing profitability of the ailing UK chain.
  • (15) He paid the fines and, as a self-imposed additional penance, painted religious murals for various Baptist chapels around the city.
  • (16) Perhaps it was as a kind of penance that, under the Tories’ free schools programme, Hyman, now a qualified teacher, set up School 21 (a school for the 21st century, geddit?).
  • (17) O’Brien was Britain’s most senior Roman Catholic cleric at the time, and he was ordered by the Vatican to spend a period of time in “prayer and penance”.
  • (18) Given all this, it's not surprising that ICT came to be regarded by schools as an onerous obligation and by children as a tiresome penance inflicted on them by adults who seemed to have no idea about the online world.
  • (19) Now perhaps these same people have accepted the austerity measures largely because they see them as a form of penance; this is even the language that their politicians have couched their policies in to sell them.
  • (20) Having already ticked off the home secretary and the education secretary for conducting their private feud in public, he sent the bulk of Eric Pickles to separate them on the front bench as they did their two-hour penance on the naughty step answering urgent questions in the Commons on extremism in schools.