What's the difference between brief and pithy?

Brief


Definition:

  • (a.) Short in duration.
  • (a.) Concise; terse; succinct.
  • (a.) Rife; common; prevalent.
  • (adv.) Briefly.
  • (adv.) Soon; quickly.
  • (a.) A short concise writing or letter; a statement in few words.
  • (a.) An epitome.
  • (a.) An abridgment or concise statement of a client's case, made out for the instruction of counsel in a trial at law. This word is applied also to a statement of the heads or points of a law argument.
  • (a.) A writ; a breve. See Breve, n., 2.
  • (n.) A writ issuing from the chancery, directed to any judge ordinary, commanding and authorizing that judge to call a jury to inquire into the case, and upon their verdict to pronounce sentence.
  • (n.) A letter patent, from proper authority, authorizing a collection or charitable contribution of money in churches, for any public or private purpose.
  • (v. t.) To make an abstract or abridgment of; to shorten; as, to brief pleadings.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The following is a brief review of the history, mechanism of action, and potential adverse effects of neuromuscular blockers.
  • (2) This article is intended as a brief practical guide for physicians and physiotherapists concerned with the treatment of cystic fibrosis.
  • (3) Brief treadmill exercise tests showed appropriate rate response to increased walking speed and gradient.
  • (4) In addition to the phase diagrams reported here for these two binary mixtures, a brief theoretical discussion is given of other possible phase diagrams that may be appropriate to other lipid mixtures with particular consideration given to the problem of crystalline phases of different structures and the possible occurrence of second-order phase transitions in these mixtures.
  • (5) The introduction of intravenous, high-dose thrombolytic therapy during a brief period has markedly reduced mortality of patients with acute myocardial infarction.
  • (6) Though the 54-year-old designer made brief returns to the limelight after his fall from grace, designing a one-off collection for Oscar de la Renta last year , his appointment at Margiela marks a more permanent comeback.
  • (7) The present status of percutaneous coronary angioplasty is presented, with a brief outline of current technique, the technical and clinical indications for the method, and the results being obtained.
  • (8) It is suitable either for brief sampling of AP durations when recording with microelectrodes, which may impale cells intermittently, or for continuous monitoring, as with suction electrodes on intact beating hearts in situ.
  • (9) We found no statistically significant difference in one-year, biochemically validated, sustained cessation rates between the group offered the long-term follow-up visits (12.5%) and the group given the brief intervention (10.2%).
  • (10) If anyone should have been briefed on Prism and Tempora, it should have been the NSC.
  • (11) A subgroup of 40 patients was asked to complete a brief survey on medical care information and satisfaction.
  • (12) It will act as a further disincentive for women to seek help.” When Background Briefing visited Catherine Haven in February, the refuge looked deserted, and most of its rooms were empty, despite the town having one of the highest domestic violence rates in the state.
  • (13) Technically speaking, this modality of brief psychotherapy is based on the nonuse of transferential interpretations, on impeding the regression od the patient, on facilitating a cognitice-affective development of his conflicts and thus obtain an internal object mutation which allows the transformation of the "past" into true history, and the "present" into vital perspectives.
  • (14) So the government wants a “root and branch” review to decide whether the BBC has “been chasing mass ratings at the expense of its original public service brief” ( BBC faces ‘root and branch’ review of its size and remit , 13 July).
  • (15) Brief digestion at neutral pH without reduction produced a molecule in which the Fab and Fc fragments were still linked by a pair of labile disulphide bridges, and the Fc fragment released by cleaving these bonds, called 1Fc fragment, contained a portion of the ;hinge' region including an interchain disulphide bridge.
  • (16) A brief review of the last decade or so of developments in health politics, policy and law suggests that health is no longer a field of mere "dynamics without change."
  • (17) Sharif Mobley, 30, whose lawyers consider him to be disappeared, managed to call his wife in Philadelphia on Thursday, the first time they had spoken since February and a rare independent proof he is alive since a brief phone call with his mother in July.
  • (18) This review of androgenetic alopecia (AA) in women provides a summary of hair physiology and biochemistry, a general discussion of AA, and a brief description of other types of hair loss in women.
  • (19) They’re putting on a heavy sales job as one would expect,” Texas representative Mac Thornberry, the Republican who chairs the House armed services committee, told reporters upon leaving one of the briefings.
  • (20) A U-shaped second-grade polynomic relationship (R = 0.69) was found between steady state of haloperidol and percentage improvement in total score on the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale.

Pithy


Definition:

  • (superl.) Consisting wholly, or in part, of pith; abounding in pith; as, a pithy stem; a pithy fruit.
  • (superl.) Having nervous energy; forceful; cogent.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) And while Altmejd presents sexual scenes of cartoonish horror and disgust, Lucas's art has embraced lavatorial humour, abjection, self-denigration, the pithy sculptural one-liner and the obscene gesture.
  • (2) This headline is a closely packed, multifaceted, pithy, rousing, basically perfect example of how strikes are presented in the tabloids, and have been for years.
  • (3) In fact, her pithy insults are deployed so regularly that colleagues on the spending watchdog have come up with the idea of playing “Margaret Hodge bingo”, scoring points when one of her putdowns pops out.
  • (4) The reshuffle had inspired some pithy one-liners and the PM was determined to deploy them all.
  • (5) Someone who bought tickets for a tennis event at the O2 sent me this pithy tweet: “4 tickets.
  • (6) There are plenty of 30-page documents and pithy slogans – but, as far as I can discover, nothing in between.
  • (7) It was a pithy line that feeds into the schtick about a bloated Brussels filled with born bureaucrats.
  • (8) The hawkish senator also defined his foreign policy: “A clenched fist and an open hand, you choose.” But the extent to which such pithy quips will help bolster Graham’s campaign – the senator is currently polling at 0.5% – remains questionable.
  • (9) But he has left Labour vulnerable over Brexit because the policy is so nuanced it cannot easily be boiled down to a pithy remark .
  • (10) Shortly after the YouTube sensation that was Jeremy Paxman's October interview with Russell Brand , Paxman wrote a pithy column about his disillusion with Westminster politics.
  • (11) Johnson, whose pithy interventions have caused embarrassment for all the major parties since the election campaign kicked off, opened the debate by stressing the gulf between the two major parties’ tax and spending plans.
  • (12) Sated by three years of Special One pyrotechnics, the British press might be ready to be charmed by Ramos' brand of quietly pithy humour.
  • (13) Obama: While the president generally struggled to get his "zingers" across, over-larding them with too much detail, he did get in a pithy dig about Romney's vague budget proposals which he claimed didn't add up.
  • (14) Jimmy Fallon, the host of the 2017 Golden Globes, has made a career of creating pithy viral moments that transcend television and resonate on the internet, but at this year’s ceremony the host was outdone by a bizarre recurring slip-up.
  • (15) In the months since their formation, the eight members of Pussy Riot have perfected their own form of protest: their songs are pithy, angry missives, largely directed at Putin, and they remain beguilingly anonymous – the band wear neon balaclavas to conceal their identities and perform flash gigs in unexpected places: on public transport, for example, and, once, on a prison roof.
  • (16) Instead, finance ministers signed up to a pithy list of bullet points, pledging to unleash all the policy weapons at their disposal against the crisis.
  • (17) The club was the brainchild of New Jersey shoe salesman Barney Josephson: a pithy antidote to the snooty, often racist elitism of other New York nightspots.
  • (18) But threnodies are not an argument, and memories are definitely not facts (Hobsbawm's pithy condemnation of oral history, delivered at a conference where I was due to speak, was terrifying).
  • (19) From a leader not known for her trenchant words or pithy sound bites her strong stance of the past few days has come as a surprise.
  • (20) You might expect he’d specialise in pithy one-liners, but in fact Delaney spins longer yarns onstage, all powered by a spirit of relentless cynicism.