What's the difference between cataclysm and catastrophe?

Cataclysm


Definition:

  • (n.) An extensive overflow or sweeping flood of water; a deluge.
  • (n.) Any violent catastrophe, involving sudden and extensive changes of the earth's surface.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) In the absence of cataclysmic hemorrhage, this easier procedure usually does not cause any irreversible neurological deficit.
  • (2) It is this ultra-austerianism that has led to the cataclysmic beggaring of Greece, bleeding the patient white and then – when seeing that he’s dying – insisting that he bleed some more.
  • (3) So soon afterwards, here was their new leader telling them they had made a cataclysmic error: far from divine, Stalin was satanic.
  • (4) When George Robertson, erstwhile secretary general of Nato, used a New York speech to warn of the "cataclysmic" effects of a yes vote, suggesting it would be an early Christmas present for global terrorists, even close colleagues had to avert their ears.
  • (5) The first patient died within a few minutes of admission from a cataclysmic hematemesis.
  • (6) Although the major studies concerning the probable course of events after the seven-year exemption expires indicate that there will not be a cataclysmic effect on institutions of higher education, it is still not certain how tenured faculty will behave and how that will affect medical schools.
  • (7) "The whole world is in cataclysmic disillusionment," he says, pouring his fizzy water.
  • (8) Elements of a "perfect storm", a global cataclysm, are assembled.
  • (9) Some might argue that our eyes weren't quite on the ball back in '89: never mind the cataclysmic political upheaval in eastern Europe – the results of which still echo around the world – let's devote ourselves to a page concerned with vexed questions such as: why is water wet?
  • (10) There are bad days, increasingly so for them, but then there are days like this that break new boundaries of cataclysmic play and make those of us who predicted a close series seem like end-of-the-pier charlatan soothsayers.
  • (11) As in Baghdad in 2003, so in Tripoli in 2011: the destruction of authority was more cataclysmic than any other worst-case scenario.
  • (12) In practice, such a cataclysmic decision is still a long way off.
  • (13) Cataclysmal hemorrhage occurred in eight patients with known aggressive squamous cell tumors of the head and neck.
  • (14) Israel could instead wait until that day comes, and thereby enjoy many more years of West Bank control and the security advantages that go with it – particularly valuable at a time of cataclysm in the region.
  • (15) Agents lethal to chicken embryos and mice were isolated from the blood and spleen of 2 muskrats and 2 snowshoe hares which died during the cataclysmic die-off of 1961 in Central Saskatchewan.
  • (16) That said, we don’t think this is a prelude to another 2008-style cataclysm.
  • (17) The young Yorkist King Edward IV's impetuous union with the beautiful Elizabeth Woodville didn't produce such an immediate bloodbath in 15th-century England, but its eventual consequences – dead princes in the Tower, a usurping king slaughtered at Bosworth and the coming of the Tudors – were scarcely less cataclysmic: the Plantagenets, like the Starks, wiped out by their enemies.
  • (18) "Cataclysmic money" was spent razing extant if tatty inner city zones, with their diverse uses, their self-generated social and economic energy vibrating on crowded sidewalks.
  • (19) A quite different picture is that of hemorrhagic ulcer occurring abruptly without any warning signs in 6 cases, causing cataclysmal bleeding in three.
  • (20) The late postoperative hemorrhages are the most severe ones, often cataclysmic (eight cases with five deaths, 62.5%) being mainly the result of the primitive carotid erosion by a salivary fistula.

Catastrophe


Definition:

  • (n.) An event producing a subversion of the order or system of things; a final event, usually of a calamitous or disastrous nature; hence, sudden calamity; great misfortune.
  • (n.) The final event in a romance or a dramatic piece; a denouement, as a death in a tragedy, or a marriage in a comedy.
  • (n.) A violent and widely extended change in the surface of the earth, as, an elevation or subsidence of some part of it, effected by internal causes.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) When it was grown, it would bring both ecstasy and catastrophe to women.
  • (2) The effects of brain injury can be catastrophic and long-term so the impact of more research would be vast, but affected numbers are too small so it loses out.
  • (3) After violence had run its bloody course, the country’s rulers conceded it had been a catastrophe that had brought nothing but “grave disorder, damage and retrogression”.
  • (4) Strict precautions are necessary to prevent the catastrophic events resulting from inadvertent gentamicin injection; such precautions should include precise labeling of all injectable solutions on the surgical field, waiting to draw up injectable antibiotics until the time they are needed, and drawing up injectable antibiotics under direct physician observation.
  • (5) In contrast, the 2009 report, "Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment" , published by the New York Academy of Sciences, comes to a very different conclusion.
  • (6) As a result, low-lying areas, including Bangladesh, Florida, the Maldives and the Netherlands, will undergo catastrophic flooding, while in Britain large areas of the Norfolk Broads and the Thames estuary could disappear.
  • (7) It is found that, in contrast to most metallic materials yet in keeping with many ceramics, there are no distinct fracture morphologies in pyro-carbons which are characteristic of a specific mode of loading; fracture surfaces appear to be identical for both catastrophic and subcritical crack growth under either sustained or cyclic loading.
  • (8) In the midst of this catastrophe, the troika is insisting on further austerity to achieve massive primary budget surpluses of 3% in 2015, 4.5% in 2016 and even more in future years.
  • (9) The first report, released last September in Stockholm , found humans were the "dominant cause" of climate change, and warned that much of the world's fossil fuel reserves would have to stay in the ground to avoid catastrophic climate change.
  • (10) "We believe that such a path would be catastrophic for the UK, for Europe and for the protection of human rights around the world."
  • (11) A large number of flight accidents and catastrophes associated with the human factor, high nervous and psychic tension when being on duty, increasing trend towards a greater incidence of psychogenic diseases responsible for pilots to be grounded make it necessary to develop a system of primary psychoprophylaxis of the flying personnel and to help them with various social, psychohygienic and psychoprophylactic measures.
  • (12) This would sound gilded, except here is Klebold, revisiting every detail in a way that implies it might have been easier on her psychologically if there had been a catastrophe in the household, something pointing to why Dylan did what he did.
  • (13) Self-help groups can aid an individual in coping with and adapting to catastrophic illness.
  • (14) Catastrophes, though always regrettable, must be seen as experiments demanding careful analysis and exploitation.
  • (15) This set was called by the authors a syndrome reflecting an overpowering, but latent, unconscious sense of crisis, of a catastrophe ("Catastrophe-syndrome").
  • (16) But Blair's address - "history will forgive us" - was a dubious exercise in group therapy: the cheers smacked of pathetic gratitude, as he piously pardoned the legislators, as well as himself, for the catastrophe of Iraq.
  • (17) I argue that (a) the procedures they used to study confounding were suboptimal because multiple measures of depression and catastrophizing were not employed and (b) the distinctiveness of constructs might better be regarded as a continuous rather than all-or-none (having adequate discriminant validity versus being confounded) concept.
  • (18) Newborn infants with congenital homozygous protein C deficiency develop catastrophic thrombosis (purpura fulminans) and will not survive beyond the neonatal period without protein C replacement.
  • (19) But the humanitarian catastrophes in Syria have been overshadowed by stories about Islamic State .
  • (20) We do not anticipate major impact on psychiatric tasks from some form of catastrophic insurance.