What's the difference between blemish and taint?

Blemish


Definition:

  • (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.

Taint


Definition:

  • (n.) A thrust with a lance, which fails of its intended effect.
  • (n.) An injury done to a lance in an encounter, without its being broken; also, a breaking of a lance in an encounter in a dishonorable or unscientific manner.
  • (v. i.) To thrust ineffectually with a lance.
  • (v. t.) To injure, as a lance, without breaking it; also, to break, as a lance, but usually in an unknightly or unscientific manner.
  • (v. t.) To hit or touch lightly, in tilting.
  • (v. t.) To imbue or impregnate with something extraneous, especially with something odious, noxious, or poisonous; hence, to corrupt; to infect; to poison; as, putrid substance taint the air.
  • (v. t.) Fig.: To stain; to sully; to tarnish.
  • (v. i.) To be infected or corrupted; to be touched with something corrupting.
  • (v. i.) To be affected with incipient putrefaction; as, meat soon taints in warm weather.
  • (n.) Tincture; hue; color; tinge.
  • (n.) Infection; corruption; deprivation.
  • (n.) A blemish on reputation; stain; spot; disgrace.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) While ruling that there had been improper use of Schedule 7 powers, the judge commented: "It was clear that the Security Service, for entirely understandable reasons, was anxious if possible to get information which could not be regarded as tainted by torture allegations or which might confirm the propriety of a control order."
  • (2) But it has a tainted reputation: the 2007 foot and mouth outbreak was traced to a leak from Pirbright’s drains.
  • (3) Those wrongdoings taint a whole industry beyond the handful of people and that makes it a huge problem."
  • (4) One half hour following the ingestion of a possibly tainted antibiotic capsule, a 14 year-old female experienced acute onset of stiffness and weakness in her lower extremities.
  • (5) It might smell close to pot, he said, but would be “tainted” because of all the other items and plants like poison oak burning along with it.
  • (6) Attorneys for the family of Rice, who was killed by police officer Timothy Loehmann while holding a pellet gun in a park in Cleveland in November last year, said the pair of external reports had “tainted the grand jury process” that is considering criminal charges against Loehmann.
  • (7) A simple, cheap and rapid method for the quantitative determination of the boar taint substance, 5 alpha-androst-16-en-3-one, in pig adipose tissue is described.
  • (8) The scale scores the constitutional taints, the extent of the operation, the age, the eventual emergency, the special anaesthetic risk.
  • (9) The second is that almost eight years after voting in the conclave that chose Benedict XVI, Cardinal Keith O'Brien seems too irredeemably tainted by scandal and allegations of hypocrisy to find himself electing any future popes.
  • (10) Part of the difficulty in making the case may be that the euro has translated into brutal austerity on parts of the continent’s south, tainting the EU’s claims to be a levelling force.
  • (11) County prosecutors may have to review hundreds of current and past convictions involving the officers to determine if their contribution to such cases was tainted by racial bias.
  • (12) Police and social workers in Oxfordshire had a tainted perception that girls as young as 11 consented to sex with men who raped and brutalised them, an independent report into the failure to stop their exploitation has said.
  • (13) This can contribute to mitigating the dangerously polarising and alarmist discourse that views migrants as a threat to a society and its public order.” The senior European human rights official says he is worried that this “dominant political discourse which is tainted by alarmism” has led to the unsurprising outcome that the public consider immigration as the most important issue facing the country ahead of health, crime or the economy.
  • (14) … Like that in any way mitigates what was done to him.” Sharpton said police tried to taint Garner’s image after his death by quickly releasing his arrest record.
  • (15) However, the Portuguese does not believe that all Chelsea supporters should be tainted by the incident.
  • (16) Thiophenol and thiocresol which sporadically cause offensive sulfury taints in Wisconsin River fish were also found in river sediment.
  • (17) Hamid Karzai, who was then president, eventually forced the Americans out of Nerkh, but the lack of justice continues to taint residents’ view of his successor.
  • (18) The big society strikes me as a political construct, a tainted venture.
  • (19) Sanlu, the firm at the heart of the problems, knew the milk was tainted months before it told local officials.
  • (20) Blood supplies were eventually tainted out of this failure to take constructive action, with the resultant mass infection of segments of the Brazilian population.