What's the difference between colloquialism and nonsense?

Colloquialism


Definition:

  • (n.) A colloquial expression, not employed in formal discourse or writing.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) When the Washington Post reports a boom in bullet-proof backpacks for children, it is not a good time to be a resident of a place colloquially known as The Arms.
  • (2) The prose rhythm and colloquial diction here work against exaggeration, but allow for humour.
  • (3) In colloquial terms, senior ministers in the new government should have been having more cups of tea with the crossbench members in the Senate in the weeks and months after the election.
  • (4) This paper attempts a new departure both in German dialectology and in phonemic analysis: (i) It is based on an open corpus of spontaneous, colloquial speech.
  • (5) The Stanford Health Assessment Questionnaire was modified for use amongst British patients by the substitution of colloquial expressions.
  • (6) For both thyroxine and triiodothyronine the component contribution of within-individual variation to the population-based variation (the latter also termed the 'reference interval', or colloquially the 'normal range') was small.
  • (7) We can end our nation’s domestic violence epidemic by properly funding crisis lines, legal centres, emergency accommodation, affordable long-term accommodation and prevention.” Thousands of Australians still turned away from homeless services Read more Labor introduced a private members’ bill earlier in the year to criminalise the sharing of private sexual imagery without the consent of the subject, a practice colloquially known as revenge porn.
  • (8) Emad Hajjaj, a popular Jordanian cartoonist, drew an elderly Palestinian woman by her sagging UN tent saying – in an untranslatable pun on the words “Charlie” and the colloquial Arabic “I have been” – that she had lived as a refugee for the 67 years since the creation of Israel in 1948.
  • (9) The media as a whole should be united in defending freedom of expression.” NewstrAid, known colloquially as “Old Ben”, was set up in 1839 to support newspaper vendors in London.
  • (10) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a poem that succeeds through a series of vivid contrasts: standard English contrasting with colloquial speech; the devotion and virtue of the young knight contrasting with the growling threats of his green foe; exchanges of courtly love contrasting with none-too-subtle sexual innuendo; exquisite robes and priceless crowns contrasting with spurting blood and the steaming organs of butchered animals; polite, indoor society contrasting with the untamed, unpredictable outdoors.
  • (11) Whereas in 37 of 51 patients a normal or almost normal colloquial speech could be demonstrated, 30 of 39 patients with cleft lip and palate showed a normal or almost normal realization of the test sentences.
  • (12) Comey made self-deprecating jokes and slipped into colloquialisms.
  • (13) He was studiedly colloquial – "You won't believe this, Jacqueline" – and cast himself as the rebel.
  • (14) Being friends with Irish people is almost a nostalgic thing – we can speak some Irish language, reminisce about Irish colloquialisms and talk about sports.
  • (15) Similar changes were also observed on acupuncture points CV17 (Shan Zhong), CV 22 (Tian Tu), Yin Tang (at an area just between the eyebrows: the pituitary gland representation area, colloquially known as the "third eye") and GV20(Bai Hui), the entire pericardium meridian & triple burner meridian, their acupuncture points, the adrenal glands, testes, ovaries and perineum, as well as along the entire spinal vertebrae, particularly on and above the 12th thoracic vertebra, medulla oblongata, pons, and the intestinal representation areas of the brain located just above and behind the upper ear.
  • (16) In his commentary, Robinson writes that Chaplin "can move without warning from the baldly colloquial to dazzling yet apparently effortless imagery, as when the crushed Calvero gazes 'wearily into the secretive river, gliding phantom-like in a life of its own … smiling satanically at him as it flecked myriad lights from the moon and from the lamps along the embankment'".
  • (17) When a physician performs unprofessional activity breaking the rules of his profession, which is colloquially interpreted as charlatanism, the term "malpractice" is used.
  • (18) He volunteered initially but within months had secured a permanent position in the West Wing, latterly as the President's aide – a role dubbed the "body man", or more colloquially "butt boy" in the US.
  • (19) The voice that Plath eventually created is indeed fresh, brazen and colloquial, but also sardonic and bitter, the story of a young woman's psychological disintegration and eventual – provisional – recovery.
  • (20) He might have said "we agree to disagree" or used some other flaccid political colloquialism for the truth – that to Gordon, this lady's views were bizarre – but he just said it like it was.

Nonsense


Definition:

  • (n.) That which is not sense, or has no sense; words, or language, which have no meaning, or which convey no intelligible ideas; absurdity.
  • (n.) Trifles; things of no importance.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Virtually every developed country has some form of property tax, so the idea that valuing residential property is uniquely difficult, or that it would be widely evaded, is nonsense.
  • (2) To this end, a meiosis-defective mating-type mutation was used as a marker for the plus segment, by taking advantage of its suppressibility by a nonsense suppressor.
  • (3) Real ear CVRs, calculated from real ear recordings of nonsense syllables, were obtained from eight hearing-impaired listeners.
  • (4) The first paper of this series (Picheny, Durlach, & Braida, 1985) presented evidence that there are substantial intelligibility differences for hearing-impaired listeners between nonsense sentences spoken in a conversational manner and spoken with the effort to produce clear speech.
  • (5) These data suggest that yeast tyrosyl-tRNA synthetase interacts with positions 34 and 35 of the anticodon of tRNATyr and opens the possibility that nonsense suppressor efficiency may be mediated by the level of aminoacylation.
  • (6) But this no-nonsense venue, just 10km but a world away from parliament, is the latest stop in a national pro-renewables tour that is making the Abbott government decidedly uncomfortable.
  • (7) Free recall of nonsense syllables was significantly better when these were learned under active compound.
  • (8) "It is clear this is a government which is short of ideas, desperately trying to bring up nonsensical diversions to distract attention from the situation in the country.
  • (9) Four regA mutants (regA1, regA8, regA11, and regA15) failed to make a protein having a molecular weight of about 12,000, whereas mutant regA9 did make such a protein; regA15 produced a new, apparently smaller protein that was presumably a nonsense fragment, whereas regA11 produced a new, apparently larger protein.
  • (10) In the first, span and free-recall measures were obtained for 24 subjects, each tested with four types of spoken material (nonsense syllables, random words, fourth-order approximations to English, and normal prose).
  • (11) I’d have been a TV celeb type, done these albums that are nonsense – and yeah, with hindsight, that wouldn’t have been a bad idea.
  • (12) In addition, purified protein of 62,000 daltons, resulting from the suppression of the nonsense mutations tox-30 and tox-45, will react with antisera purified against the terminal 17,000 daltons of the toxin molecule and are immunologically identical to toxin by radial immunodiffusion.
  • (13) The other three carry nonsense mutations which inactivate both the excision repair and essential functions.
  • (14) La Manga in Spain is an example of human nonsense: 20km of city length, two kilometres wide, with huge buildings all along,” said Couet.
  • (15) In a sign of Labour's need to avoid tension with business, Darling was careful to stress he was not criticising the signatories but said: "I wonder if one of their finance directors came to them and said 'look, we have this wonderful idea, and we are going to pay with it by savings we have not yet identified and by calculations we cannot verify', they would say 'that is complete nonsense'."
  • (16) The mutation, which is not of the common CG-to-TG type, is at the same codon in which both nonsense and a different missense (Arg to Gln) have previously been observed.
  • (17) Introduction of an ochre nonsense codon into the reading frame of the leader peptide sequence leads to considerable reduction of the basal expression and loss of inducibility of the cat gene.
  • (18) On the Iraq war, he admitted he had voted in favour of military action in 2003 though he said he thought at the time that Blair's claims about weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were "nonsense".
  • (19) Two nonsense mutations at codon positions 33 and 187 and an aberrant splice site were found in the human gene.
  • (20) The studies on the reverse mutation of osm3 indicated that this osmotic-sensitivity arises from a missense or nonsense mutation in OSM3 locus.