What's the difference between capricious and mercurial?

Capricious


Definition:

  • (a.) Governed or characterized by caprice; apt to change suddenly; freakish; whimsical; changeable.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The production of vocal sound is not capricious, it follows certain laws many of which are not known.
  • (2) Yet beneath the facade of implacable command was a moody, capricious man with a strained marriage: while he was in India, his wife Edwina had allegedly conducted an affair with the Indian politician Nehru.
  • (3) In one undisclosed court document in Kenya, seen by the Guardian, BAT’s lawyers demand the country’s high court “quash in its entirety” a package of anti-smoking regulations and rails against what it calls a “capricious” tax plan.
  • (4) The individual number of pathological scores showed a decrease already within the first treatment week and a further decrease by the end of the trial, especially for the items of capriciousness, obstinacy, irritability and restlessness.
  • (5) The rains in Katine sub-county in rural Uganda have been capricious all year, beyond the control even of such a faithful community as this.
  • (6) Degree of compliance with dietary advice, especially of the pregnant woman with a capricious appetite, is understandably difficult to assess.
  • (7) Opportunistic infections are increasingly becoming a problem in cancer patients amongst whom infection with Nocardia species is particularly difficult to detect due to the capricious natural history of the disease.
  • (8) Ashley can be capricious but unless he has a dramatic change of heart, the manager will have the chance to start winning back hearts and minds against Hull.
  • (9) Gambians had come to expect surprises from their leader – cruel, violent and capricious in power – just not ones that set the whole nation dancing in the streets and sent shockwaves of joy and inspiration across the continent.
  • (10) She has played middling singers and capricious interns, dancers, dreamers and damsels in distress, and she has done so with such ease and abandon that the actor and her alter egos have a tendency to blur.
  • (11) Antimicrobial susceptibility testing is somewhat capricious in part from the marked effect of inoculum size in some circumstances.
  • (12) That needs to be taken into consideration.” Philipp Mißfelder, foreign policy spokesman for the Christian Democratic Union, said: “I think deportations and extraditions to countries that have the death penalty are very problematic.” The Berlin judiciary should under no circumstances allow itself to become a willing tool of Cairo's capricious regime Franziska Brantner, Green party Egypt accuses both Qatar and al-Jazeera of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, which was branded a terrorist organisation after the military deposed the president, Mohamed Morsi, in 2013.
  • (13) Detailed, within-subjects Golgi analyses of regional differences in cerebellar Purkinje cell dendritic development are impractical due to the capriciousness of that technique.
  • (14) HBFP technique is capricious and the differentiation step should be controlled stringently; ethanolic picric acid, therefore, is recommended as a differentiation fluid.
  • (15) And in part, as Murray staggered about indiscriminately high-fiving at the end, there was a sense that this has also been something of a rather mannered love story, at its centre Murray and that prim, capricious, but in the end compliantly adorable Wimbledon crowd.
  • (16) With De Jong not properly match fit, Vito Mannone remained under-employed but Sunderland's goalkeeper did save a capriciously curving shot from Tioté quite brilliantly.
  • (17) Having bowled out England in their second innings for 123, West Indies were required to make 192 to win the match and square the series and the expectation was that it would be a tough call for them, given the capricious nature of the pitch on the first two days, not least a second day in which 18 wickets fell, which is unprecedented for a Test match in Barbados.
  • (18) This bilingual city in the eastern “Maritime” Canadian province of New Brunswick had appeared the ideal venue for these teams but with dark rain clouds hovering in the humid skies and a capricious wind blowing, the residents of the French speaking suburb of Dieppe and English speaking Riverview had evidently decided to stay indoors.
  • (19) Zwiebel argues the bill would invite capricious litigation "that could be extremely harmful to some of the most important institutions in our community".
  • (20) However, the standards and essentials that are ultimately adopted must be applied uniformly and fairly and not in an arbitrary or capricious manner.

Mercurial


Definition:

  • (a.) Having the qualities fabled to belong to the god Mercury; swift; active; sprightly; fickle; volatile; changeable; as, a mercurial youth; a mercurial temperament.
  • (a.) Having the form or image of Mercury; -- applied to ancient guideposts.
  • (a.) Of or pertaining to Mercury as the god of trade; hence, money-making; crafty.
  • (a.) Of or pertaining to, or containing, mercury; as, mercurial preparations, barometer. See Mercury, 2.
  • (a.) Caused by the use of mercury; as, mercurial sore mouth.
  • (n.) A person having mercurial qualities.
  • (n.) A preparation containing mercury.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) There is a considerably larger variability of the mercury levels in urine than in blood.
  • (2) Mercury compounds and EDTA were found to be potent inhibitors of proteinase yscJ activity.
  • (3) The effects of postnatal methyl mercury exposure on the ontogeny of renal and hepatic responsiveness to trophic stimuli were examined.
  • (4) The fact that it is still used is regrettable yet unavoidable at present, but the average quantity is three times less than the mercury released into the atmosphere by burning the extra coal need to power equivalent incandescent bulbs.
  • (5) As yet the observations demonstrate that workers exposed in their occupation to heavy metals (cadmium, lead, metalic mercury) and organic solvents should be subjected to special control for detection of renal changes.
  • (6) Concern about the safety of the patient and dental personnel does exist, however, due to the possibilities of mercury poisoning.
  • (7) In order to determine the specific action of cadmium on bone metabolism, the effect of cadmium on alkaline phosphatase activity, a marker enzyme of osteoblasts, was compared with that of other divalent heavy metal ions, i.e., zinc, manganese, lead, copper, nickel and mercury (10 microM each), using cloned osteoblast-like cells, MC3T3-E1.
  • (8) Inorganic mercury as HgSO4 or HgCl2, at dietary levels up to 200 p.p.m.
  • (9) An analysis of the clinical markers indicated no clear relationship between elevated urinary mercury concentrations and kidney dysfunction.
  • (10) In vivo the administration of captopril prevented the toxic effects of mercury poisoning on membrane permeability, oxidative phosphorylation and Ca++ homeostasis.
  • (11) Histological changes were similar in inorganic and methyl mercury treated fish except the higher intensity observed in the latter treatment.
  • (12) Unlike other eukaryotic enzymes, the plant enzyme showed no activation with organic mercurials and was inhibited by urea and KCl.
  • (13) Postoperative APR improved to 86.3 millimeters of mercury and ABI to 0.63 (p less than 0.05).
  • (14) Attempts to induce mercury resistance in the aerobic isolates were successful, but no induction was seen in the anaerobes.
  • (15) High concentrations of mercury, cadmium, and lead have also been observed in urban soils.
  • (16) In the presence of peripheral vasodilatation, adequate blood flow can be expected after such bypass grafts at blood pressures as low as 80 millimeters of mercury and hypotension per se does not produce vascular steal.
  • (17) A transistor radio activated by a mercury switch was used to reinforce head posture in two retarded children with severe cerebral palsy.
  • (18) This species, therefore, seems to be about twice as sensitive to the neurotoxic properties of methyl mercury salts as the laboratory rat.
  • (19) Under this condition, MeHg- and Hg(++)-induced increases in fluorescence were associated with depolarization of psi p. A second approach was used to assess changes in psi p. In synaptosomes, the magnitude of the increase in fluorescence resulting from depolarization of psi p with a stimulus of constant intensity is a function of the resting psi p. The fluorescence response to depolarization of synaptosomes previously exposed to either MeHg or Hg++ (1-20 microM each) was reduced in a concentration-dependent manner relative to mercury-free controls.
  • (20) Of the tubular cell ultrastructures, the lysosome was the most sensitive to mercury, and there was a close relation between the excretion of urinary mercury and the mercury detoxication mechanism of the kidney.