(v. t.) To persuade by gentle, insinuating courtesy, flattering, or fondling; to wheedle; to soothe.
(n.) A simpleton; a dupe.
Example Sentences:
(1) How did Panahi manage to coax a performance out of him?
(2) But then came a challenge I couldn't turn down – busking outside Camden tube station with Billy Bragg , one of my musical and political heroes, who was happy to tutor and coax me through our favourite playlist.
(3) Coaxing form from the forward is another of Sherwood's early achievements.
(4) Human interaction made captivity more tolerable, so she coaxed it out of her kidnappers where possible.
(5) Sneijder is the last man standing from the Inter side that José Mourinho coaxed to victory over Bayern Munich in Madrid, six days after wrapping up the Italian league title and 17 after their domestic cup win.
(6) Consumer confidence has bounced back; the long-moribund housing market has been coaxed back to life even outside the capital; and retail sales are rising, helped by all the carpets and kitchens homebuyers need to kit out their new nests.
(7) Mr Salmond and his deputy, Nicola Sturgeon, tried again early yesterday to coax the Lib Dems into accepting yet another olive branch: to put their intense disagreements on an independence referendum aside while trying to agree common ground on domestic policies.
(8) Getting someone to cut down their smoking or change their diet is by coaxing, negotiation.
(9) Goodes said it was the support of Swans fans that coaxed him into extending his club record games tally to 372.
(10) The judge, Faisal Arab, had been trying to coax Musharraf to voluntarily submit to appearing in court ever since the hearings began in late December.
(11) Some were fished out of the water with the help of holidaymakers from the campsite opposite who used their own boats; others were coaxed out of their hiding places on the island.
(12) However, he was less convinced by Ant's musical merits, and coaxed his band members into forming a new group, Bow Wow Wow, which would be led by a 13-year-old girl whom McLaren met at a dry cleaners and renamed Annabella Lwin.
(13) On the face of it, the decision to suspend talks is a blow to the US secretary of state, John Kerry , who has spent almost nine months trying to coax Israelis and Palestinians into an agreement about the conflict's most contentious issues.
(14) He coaxes Hicks into repeating what Colonel Gibson told Hicks about not being able to deploy from Tripoli to Benghazi.
(15) She would far prefer to use the collective voice of future Sandbag members to coax the big industrial polluters into handing over their surplus credits than have to rely on members to buy them.
(16) The same gift of the gab that a good hotel manager deploys to schmooze an irate guest complaining about draughts made the difference between life and death; he cajoled and coaxed, flattered and deceived, lied and bribed.
(17) A similar strategy has informed my translation; although my own part of England is separated from Lud's Church by the swollen uplands of the Peak District, coaxing Gawain and his poem back into the Pennines was always part of the plan.
(18) Truly, Brexit has stirred something not heroic or celebratory or generous in the nation, but instead has coaxed into the light from some dark, damp places the lowest human impulses, from the small-minded to the mean-spirited to the murderous.” Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gina Miller at the Convention on Brexit.
(19) So what Ed Miliband should do – rather than trying to coax employers into slowly but surely adopting the living wage (which by his own thesis, some businesses – the predators – may never do), he should cut to the chase and raise the minimum wage to the living wage, thus ensuring that no one in our society is paid a wage on which it is impossible to live.
(20) But organisers of Wednesday’s anti-Murphy meeting are canvassing support from constituency Labour parties in a bid to push Murphy into voluntarily standing down, and to coax other critics of his leadership at Holyrood into publicly calling for his resignation.
Simpleton
Definition:
(n.) A person of weak intellect; a silly person.
Example Sentences:
(1) Reading your post I couldn't help but think tonight's simpletons had undergone a similar experience."
(2) But these simpletons are absolutely determined to find their seat.
(3) There’s a really big willingness to help here in Germany and a mind-boggling number of people that are doing lots for refugees, who are not racist, and I think it’s their voice that should be dominant rather than a handful of simpletons who think they should stir up hatred.” This article was amended on 7 August 2015 to correct the name of the news programme on which Reschke made her comments
(4) Maybe because I am a simpleton and sometimes can only process what I can see – the actual sky, rather than invisible cyberspace in which data blips through fibre-optic cables.
(5) George W. Bush was a Texan simpleton who took more time playing golf on his computer than deciding on executions while governor.
(6) Responses to Doyle’s tweet included one from another Twitter user who asked : “What has a Muslim woman in Croydon, got to do with the horrific events in Belgium, you simpleton?” Another, referring to the far-right extremist Anders Behring Breivik, asked : “Did anyone accost you on the streets of Croydon after the Brevik shooting in Norway?
(7) Which is also to say, for younger visitors, that the exhibition could even be seen to reduce Diana to the big-spending simpleton who was castigated in Anthony O’Hear’s revisionist essay of 1998, as shallow and self-obsessed.
(8) He is by no means the simpleton played by Peter Sellers in Being There, but, like Gardiner, every utterance, however gnomic, is now thought to contain a greater truth.
(9) And Navracsics’ hastily put together statement from yesterday seems to only repeat the same category error, a simpleton bureaucrat mantra trying to dodge the absurdity of the EU apparently having no responsibility to give any support to the EU’s own youth orchestra.
(10) These use the character of Lennie, the gentle simpleton who doesn't know his own strength from Steinbeck's 1937 novel Of Mice and Men, as a benchmark, with the court writing: "Texas citizens might agree that Steinbeck's Lennie should, by virtue of his lack of reasoning ability and adaptive skills, be exempt" .
(11) "I was a simpleton last Saturday evening at Melbourne Park."
(12) My husband is pointing out, veeerrryy slowly, as if to a simpleton, that this would involve us trebling our current mortgage.
(13) A dverts for insurance comparison websites have long treated the British public like a shower of infantilised simpletons.
(14) Top Gear's Jeremy Clarkson rapped over "special needs" joke This time it's media regulator Ofcom tut-tutting after Clarkson describes the Ferrari F430 Speciale as "a bit wrong ... that smiling front end ... it looked like a simpleton ... [it] should have been called the 430 Speciale Needs".
(15) I liked the idea of an island with a vocation – all islands should have one, surely – and Tico took great pleasure in instructing me in the difference between primary and secondary Atlantic rainforest (simpleton that I am, I thought all forest was good, but Tico tut-tutted every time we passed a coconut palm), and even more pleasure in skipping up the 990m Pico do Papagaio while I lumbered behind.