What's the difference between capricious and vagary?

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.

Vagary


Definition:

  • (n.) A wandering or strolling.
  • (n.) Hence, a wandering of the thoughts; a wild or fanciful freak; a whim; a whimsical purpose.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Dictated by underlying physicochemical constraints, deceived at times by the lulling tones of the siren entropy, and constantly vulnerable to the vagaries of other more pervasive forms of biological networking and information transfer encoded in the genes of virus and invading microorganisms, protein biorecognition in higher life forms, and particularly in mammals, represents the finely tuned molecular avenues for the genome to transfer its information to the next generation.
  • (2) Psychiatry is criticized for imprecise diagnosis, conceptual vagaries, jargon, therapeutic impotence and class bias.
  • (3) The issue of generic equivalence of topical steroids is discussed, with particular emphasis on the vagaries of the vasoconstriction assay.
  • (4) During the past 5-year period from 1986 to 1991, a total of 54 patients received living-related renal allograft and has been managed with vagaries of cyclosporin A (CYA) immunosuppressive regimen.
  • (5) Tsakalotos believes the anti-austerity government speaks for the growing numbers across Europe who, subjected to the brutal vagaries of the market, feel excluded from decision-making.
  • (6) To attempt less would allow this country's health care system to go down any road the vagaries of our political process take it.
  • (7) "You should look at it as a hedge against the vagaries."
  • (8) When employed in the direct imaging of chemiluminescent blots, the charge-coupled device can provide equal or better sensitivity than that obtained by indirect methods using film, with the additional advantages of wide dynamic range and freedom from the vagaries of film processing.
  • (9) It was ever thus for the Kurds, their destiny as a people shaped less by their own struggles than by the vagaries of regional and international politics, particularly the great Middle Eastern upheavals they periodically produce.
  • (10) It must be conceded, however, that with the vagaries of human nature there is always likely to be greater morbidity from patients with hypothyroidism failing to take their medication regularly, than from failure by the medical attendant to make minor adjustments to the dose of thyroxine.
  • (11) When I play Minecraft with Zac he gets to explain to me the vagaries and complexities of his saved kingdoms – the traps he has built, the hidden boltholes beneath looming mountains, the crops he has planted, the eggs he has nurtured, the places he goes, the things he sees.
  • (12) The vagaries of clinical staging associated with stage A disease, as well as the previously documented progression on long-term followup (8 to 10 years) in younger (60 years old or less) patients with stage A1 prostate cancer make radical prostatectomy with its limited morbidity an acceptable treatment choice.
  • (13) The response has been to force the vagaries of clinical judgment into the programmatic algorithm.
  • (14) The major cause of discrepent results with periodic cultures was attributed to vagaries in sampling.
  • (15) Combine that with having to work two jobs, make his own lunch and rely on the vagaries of public transport, and he gets three hours' sleep a night.
  • (16) Future pensioners will also suffer – as millions of employees have shifted into "defined contribution" pension plans – dependent on the vagaries of the stock market.
  • (17) The vagaries of events, people, and places leading to the scientific review are described.
  • (18) This report outlines the experience of one center in establishing a group therapy program, discussing the "readiness" of the center, reservations of the governing board, qualifications and number of group leaders, composition of the group, time-place-duration of meetings, "open" versus "closed" structure, vagaries of obtaining participants, integration with the 24-hour telephone crisis service, problems of confidentiality, and dealing with the suicide of a group member.
  • (19) In this setting the importance of the condition lies in the vagaries of its presentation and the fact that it is eminently treatable, usually by a combination of chemotherapy and surgery.
  • (20) The difficulty in articulating a clear response to Brexit, for example, stems from the absence of common instincts on the best approach to immigration, free trade, markets, and on protecting people from the economic vagaries of globalisation without retreating into bitter rejection of the modern world.