What's the difference between celibatist and spinster?
Celibatist
Definition:
(n.) One who lives unmarried.
Example Sentences:
Spinster
Definition:
(n.) A woman who spins, or whose occupation is to spin.
(n.) A man who spins.
(n.) An unmarried or single woman; -- used in legal proceedings as a title, or addition to the surname.
(n.) A woman of evil life and character; -- so called from being forced to spin in a house of correction.
Example Sentences:
(1) At one point, Walters speculates that “she looks the same weight as the Duchess – about 8st”; later, he disingenuously asks her to discuss “the cruel comments about being a ‘childless spinster’”, neither telling readers who made those “cruel comments” in the first place, or where.
(2) Lise is a lonely and strange spinster who will soon be murdered.
(3) • Petra's spinster landladies added caraway seeds to their mix.
(4) Your little country will forever be honoured as the site that made the Princess Diana thing look like a restrained wake for a loathed spinster who perished alone on a desert island.
(5) And, of course, in 1961 she published The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, her legendary tale of the Edinburgh spinster schoolteacher who devotes her middle years to her "gerrils", to Mussolini and to having illicit sex.
(6) "In the same way as the first Bridget book was looking at the way a 30-something single woman was branded as a tragic spinster, and then we got the new idea of a singleton, [the new book] will be looking at later phases in life when you get branded as a certain thing," she said, "and you don't have to be that at all and it's all outdated and ridiculous.
(7) Today the unruly hair, bushy eyebrows and spinster image that for so long attracted cruel teasing, especially from young children, are set to be the passport to her undoubted future success.
(8) A 69-year-old spinster presented with a history of generalised bone pains in September 1977.
(9) The Brontës are shown, with understated relish, as lonely, half-mad spinsters, surrounded by insufferable yokels and the unmentionable stench of death.
(10) St Paul's Girls' School, where I enjoyed the lessons of the English teacher Miss Jenkinson but little else, was a grim institution in the early 1950s - more Brontë than Austen - and the little piece of ivory on which the celebrated spinster wrote her tales of love and disappointment and sudden, unconvincing happiness, didn't mean anything to me.
(11) She stares at a fire, sitting spinster straight, stiff with grief.
(12) She had digs in Upper Leeson Street with two spinster sisters whose culinary repertoire was somewhat limited.
(13) As she neared 50, and stayed resolute about acting her age, Hepburn was the schoolteacher plunged into late love in Venice, in David Lean's Summer Madness (1955), a spinster refreshed by Burt Lancaster in The Rainmaker (1956), and a very creepy monster mother in Suddenly, Last Summer (1959).
(14) She might have stitched the whole thing in front of her hissing gas fire, with her brass ornaments twinkling in the background, Corrie playing on the telly and The Hay Wain over the fireplace.” Perry flirts with John Major territory – “cricket on the village green” makes an appearance among Perry’s aggregation of words and phrases that seem to him to express Britishness – but it is too sly to fall for the whole warm beer and cycling spinsters schtick.
(15) He also shows how cartoons formed the backbone of the anti-suffrage movement, caricaturing suffragettes as monstrous spinsters.
(16) Singledom in women is usually presented as a failure to achieve the ideal of wife and mother: single women are haunted by nasty words such as "spinster" and must contend with caricatures of lonely women who are lost without a man to define them .
(17) It seemed the only way I could face Christmas without my own family and not feel like the tragic spinster aunt for whom everyone feels a bit sorry (I cannot bear pity, and Christmas has brought out the dreaded head tilt in even the most well-intentioned loved ones).
(18) In 1811 Mary Reynolds, a somber Pennsylvania spinster, awoke from a prolonged sleep as a new personality.
(19) Jane Austen scholar Dr Paula Byrne claims to have discovered a lost portrait of the author which, far from depicting a grumpy spinster, shows a writer at the height of her powers and a woman comfortable in her own skin.
(20) So, what better high note to end an extraordinary week, one that has seen the 47-year-old Scottish singing spinster win plaudits from around the world, than the prospect of a duet with her heroine, Elaine Paige?