(v. t.) To mark with deformity; to injure or impair, as anything which is well formed, or excellent; to mar, or make defective, either the body or mind.
(v. t.) To tarnish, as reputation or character; to defame.
(n.) Any mark of deformity or injury, whether physical or moral; anything that diminishes beauty, or renders imperfect that which is otherwise well formed; that which impairs reputation.
Example Sentences:
(1) Most hemangiomas are small, harmless birthmarks that appear soon after birth, proliferate for 8 to 18 months, and then slowly regress over the next 5 to 8 years, leaving normal or slightly blemished skin.
(2) At the same time, it can also be used to eliminate dark circles around the eyes, blend in skin grafts, and mask unsightly blemishes.
(3) Gerrard got on from the bench, but is not deemed ready for an international comeback and Jagielka blemished an otherwise solid shift by conceding the penalty.
(4) Although Speed had presided over five victories and five defeats in his 10 matches in charge of the principality, there were plenty of encouraging signs in Speed's stewardship, not least that four of the wins came in the past five games, with an unlucky 1-0 defeat by England at Wembley the only blemish.
(5) Frost, wind, rain and drought can discolour and blemish produce but there is no loss of nutrients.
(6) The run of unpredictable weather this season has left farmers and growers with bumper crops of "ugly" fruit and vegetables with reported increases in blemishes and scarring, as well as shortages due to later crops.
(7) By applying the cryoprobe to the lid margin and conjunctival surface instead of to the skin it was possible to limit the degree of depigmentation in these highly pigmented lids, and only one patient showed a mild cosmetic blemish.
(8) Unsightly - and sometimes alarming - as these blemishes are, they must not distract from the reality that the House will do something historic if it listens to the advice of Barack Obama and passes legislation that remains more ambitious than anything he promised on the campaign trail.
(9) When I ask both brothers about the incontrovertible blemishes on the last government's record, the policy of locking up children at Yarl's Wood, say, or the cavernous gap between executive reward and the minimum wage, they offer vague mea culpas.
(10) In recent years, various immigration reform measures have sought to screen out “undesirables” with blemished records , ignoring the fact that immigrants are often disproportionately targeted by racial profiling , unable to afford decent legal counsel and, in some cases, denied due process in a criminal justice system that heightens penalties for non-citizens .
(11) Slovakia were already in the lead when Fabio Cannavaro, the Italy captain who went through the entire 2006 World Cup without a single disciplinary blemish, blatantly blocked Juraj Kucka with his shoulder and smiled as he picked up the caution.
(12) Golovkin, without so much as a blemish on his cherubic visage, continued to mete out punishment.
(13) The driest March in 59 years , followed by the wettest June and autumn storms and flooding have reduced British fruit and vegetable harvests by more than 25% and left supermarkets unable to source their regular shaped, blemish-free produce.
(14) It served as a microcosm of a grey Wearside day about to be blemished by Brown's dismissal.
(15) Eleven months after being sacked by Newcastle - the sole blemish on his managerial CV - Allardyce, who has signed a three-year deal, is back in management, although not perhaps at the club he was expected to join.
(16) "The unpredictable weather this season, has left growers with bumper crops of ugly-looking fruit and vegetables with reported increases in blemishes and scarring, as well as shortages due to later crops.
(17) As with all Hawthorne's fantastic stories, and especially those written for Mosses , like "The Bosom Serpent" or "The Birth-Mark" (in which a husband becomes so obsessed with his otherwise ravishing wife's single blemish that he resolves to remove it at whatever cost), there is more going on here than an exercise in the ornamental grotesque.
(18) A major advantage of this method lies in the fact that it causes the patient no discomfort and leaves his skin without blemish.
(19) Although cosmetic procedures to remove blemishes were unnecessary, it was "odd" that hip and knee replacements had been placed in the same category.
(20) The only blemish to Messi’s superb showing was a missed penalty in the first half.
Metaphor
Definition:
(n.) The transference of the relation between one set of objects to another set for the purpose of brief explanation; a compressed simile; e. g., the ship plows the sea.
Example Sentences:
(1) If figurative language is defined as involving intentional violation of conceptual boundaries in order to highlight some correspondence, one must be sure that children credited with that competence have (1) the metacognitive and metalinguistic abilities to understand at least some of the implications of such language (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Nelson, 1974; Nelson & Nelson, 1978), (2) a conceptual organization that entails the purportedly violated conceptual boundaries (Lange, 1978), and (3) some notion of metaphoric tension as well as ground.
(2) Crawford's own poetry was informed by contact with refugees – "I began to think seriously about what it felt like to lose your country or culture, and in my first book, there are one or two poems that are versions of Vietnamese poems" – and scientists, whose vocabulary he initially "stole because it seemed so metaphorically resonant.
(3) As the metaphors we are using to conduct it show, the migration debate in Britain is sorely in need of some perspective.
(4) The spotlight metaphor seems inappropriate for visual attention in a dynamic environment.
(5) In a second experiment schizophrenics were significantly different from the depressives in showing less inclination to select a metaphorical meaning to an ambiguous adjective in a sentence.
(6) Three-quarters of the sample was impaired on at least one of four discourse tests (knowing the alternate meanings of ambiguous words in context; getting the point of figurative or metaphoric expressions; bridging the inferential gaps between events in stereotyped social situations; and producing speech acts that express the apparent intentions of others).
(7) It postulates the need of all sciences to operate with symbols of various levels of abstractions, including, in a very prominent way, metaphors.
(8) This summer, if all goes to plan, the metaphor will be vividly recast: the Globe's stage will itself become a world.
(9) According to the old metaphor of classical cybernetics the brain can be considered as a computer.
(10) And Crash is an extreme metaphor of the dangers that I see lying ahead of us.
(11) The metaphor of clinical work as textual explication, however, creates the expectation that there is a text somewhere to be found.
(12) So perhaps there is a political metaphor here after all.
(13) My friend had already climbed the same metaphorical mountain that I had just reached the summit of, and when she had reached the top she sat down and wept, much to the surprise of all her British friends.
(14) The results are discussed in terms of hemispheric memory for art works, metaphors, and the relationship between the two in the brain.
(15) The Oedipus myth has been a central metaphor in the evolution of psychoanalytic theory, particularly the psychoanalytic theory of development.
(16) Second, it refers to a metaphor representing the subjective experience of these patients who are unable to find a permanent identity but feel themselves sitting on the fence between a variety of different identities in a borderline position.
(17) The Tories, ever wedded to metaphors about killing foreigners, have called this the "Dambuster" moment.
(18) As critics of Mr Berlusconi have been barred from the state broadcaster Radiotelevisione Italia, Mr Fo protests that artists are being "defenestrated" metaphorically from the RAI for the same reasons that leftwing dissidents were literally thrown out of police station windows in the 1970s when Mr Fo wrote his work Accidental Death of an Anarchist.
(19) But that's not a metaphor: the universality of computation follows from the known laws of physics.
(20) Verbal processes later gain access to this graded perceptual knowledge, thus permitting the interpretation of synesthetic metaphors according to the rules of cross-modal perception.