(n.) A picking of heart; poignant grief proceeding from a sense of guilt or consciousness of causing pain; the sting of conscience.
Example Sentences:
(1) This is especially the case when it is confronted with regimes such as those of Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin that feel no compunction over a scorched-earth response to insurgency and do so with calculation.
(2) So ends in tragedy our three-year struggle.” Didn’t she have compunctions about publishing this intimate material?
(3) Isis, which has a growing operation in Afghanistan and little compunction about slaughtering civilians, are obvious suspects.
(4) Adult fighters who have shown no compunction abducting children from playgrounds, and throwing them into the frontline, will not shy from inviting such attacks.
(5) By all accounts he is a ruthless killer who has shown little compunction when it came to the on-screen murders.
(6) If they want to achieve global dominance in any particular industry, they take direct aim at foreign competitors and have little compunction about systematically weakening them.
(7) Wes Brown's past may be bound up with Manchester United but the Sunderland centre-back had no compunction about playing a key role in denying his former club a place in the League Cup final .
(8) He said it could “hardly be Islamic to kill without compunction Shia, Yazidi, Turkmen, Kurds, Christians and Sunni who don’t share this death cult’s view of the world” and nothing could “justify the beheadings, crucifixions, mass executions, ethnic cleansing, rape and sexual slavery”.
(9) In times past, great educators have spoken without compunction about the virtues of discrimination – not the loaded modern use of the word bespeaking one-upmanship and prejudice, but discrimination as a discipline of the intellect and character.
(10) I did have compunctions until various publications and articles appeared that have got the story so wrong that I felt that before I pop my clogs I had better get the story straight.” Gabrielle was distressed, for instance, that she was quoted in one report saying her brother died a virgin.
(11) The sale of a poison is regarded as a mere act of commercial intercourse; tant pis for the unfortunate victim of error or passion; he has the benefit of a coroner's inquest; the vendor of the poison receives a reprimand, and things resume their natural course--that is, arsenic and oxalic acid are retailed without compunction, and men are hurried from time to time into eternity.
(12) As food banks proliferate, policymakers' compunction to address the root causes of poverty and hardship diminish.
(13) But the rabid anti-smoking lobby has never been satisfied with merely protecting the health of non-smokers, and appears to have lost any compunction to defend further curtailments of smoking with legitimate medical research.
(14) Dimon – and JP Morgan – have shown a lot of compunction.
(15) You have no compunction in immediately excluding coal, the product of a rival industry, from this endeavour.
(16) The regrettable reality is that to mount the kind of attacks which Isil in Syria and in Iraq has in mind for Australia, all you need is a determined individual who will kill without compunction, a knife, an iPhone, and a victim,” Abbott told the Seven Network as part of a Friday morning media blitz.
(17) Refreshingly, Steve McClaren’s successor had no compunction about leaving the best part of £45m on his bench either in the shape of Wijnaldum, Jonjo Shelvey, Aleksandar Mitrovic and Henri Saivet.
(18) I am not here to do a character work-up on someone who lost his life less than 24 hours ago.” Koval asked protesters to remain calm and said the police department would continue to protect their right to assembly, “whatever [protesters’] compunction might be.” Demonstrations that began on Saturday afternoon continued on the streets of Madison as the news conference took place.
(19) A lot of Israelis said, ‘If you’re telling us we need to choose between them and us, then we choose us, without any compunction.’” Everyone I spoke to about B’Tselem acknowledged that the second intifada had made the group’s fundamental message – that Israelis ought to care about the human rights of individual Palestinians and recognise the military occupation’s abuses as the primary human-rights violations in the region – much, much harder for Israelis to accept.
(20) But he added that if the UK suspended arms sales, “be in no doubt that we would be vacating a space that would rapidly be filled by other western countries who would happily supply arms with nothing like the same compunctions or criteria or respect for humanitarian law.
Hesitation
Definition:
(n.) The act of hesitating; suspension of opinion or action; doubt; vacillation.
(n.) A faltering in speech; stammering.
Example Sentences:
(1) It appeared Dunaway and Warren Beatty had an envelope containing a card naming a previous award won by La La Land, prompting visible hesitation between the two veteran actors before Dunaway went ahead and named La La Land.
(2) Nocturia (OR 1.8) and hesitancy (OR 4.3) were found to be predictive of surgery for younger men (age range 49-55), while only nocturia (OR 2.4) was predictive among older men (age range 62-68).
(3) Maybe this will be increasing the frequency of patrols, or going to places that the Obama administration has been hesitant to go – such as actually undertaking a non-innocent passage military patrols within 12 miles of an artificial island.
(4) The standards committee report by a cross-party group of MPs said it "deplored" stings but would "not hesitate to act in such cases if wrongdoing had occurred".
(5) The Senate’s economic references committee accused Asic of missing or ignoring persistent signs of wrongdoing , characterising it as a “timid, hesitant regulator” that was too ready to uncritically accept assurances of a large institution that there were no grounds for intervention.
(6) April 16, 2014 The hesitancy – or unwillingness – of Ukrainian troops to use their weapons has produced multiple awkward confrontations with civilian crowds Wednesday, including one in Pchyolkino south of Kratamorsk, which seems still to be unresolved after an hours-long standoff.
(7) He "jumped without hesitation", said official sources quoted in the Daily Breeze.
(8) But the character – compounded of piercing sanity and existential despair, infinite hesitation and impulsive action, self-laceration and observant irony – is so multi-faceted, it is bound to coincide at some point with an actor’s particular gifts.
(9) The Clinton campaign manager also hesitated when asked if any of his staff had access to Sanders’ records, saying he was sure no one had “reached into Bernie Sanders’ data and extracted it in the way that the Bernie Sanders campaign did this week”.
(10) Their hesitations are focusing in on provisions to cut more than $800bn from the Medicaid budget by phasing out the expansion of the program that had brought healthcare coverage to an extra 11 million adult Americans.
(11) Photograph: Alamy While most politicians would have immediately sent for the drillers, Acosta hesitated.
(12) For instance; hesitant to go to a hot spring, or on a trip with friends (76%), hesitant to go to a clinic or a hospital for physical check-ups and common illness (74%), troublesome to wear special underwear (69%), inconvenient because ordinary clothes cannot be worn (56%), distressed when viewing own body (52%), unable to dress in thin clothes in hot summer season (50%), imbalance of the breasts (49%), inconvenient to participate in sports (47%).
(13) Few would hesitate to allow their data to be used in a project that could improve outcomes for everyone.
(14) But Fallon said that “ we would not hesitate ” to kill others whom the UK understands to represent active terrorist threats, all without disclosing the evidence justifying that designation or subjecting it to scrutiny.
(15) Fox himself has seemed a little hesitant on the few occasions he has answered questions about Werritty.
(16) The referring physician should not hesitate to ask for perioperative mortality statistics from the referral center.
(17) Ms Williams's name will already be familiar to many gay rights campaigners courtesy of a memorable speech on same-sex relationships, in which she applauded Jamaica's criminalisation of what her sect considers a curable aberration, a diagnosis she did not hesitate to apply to Tom Daly.
(18) Then Jake Connor, an 18-year-old who replaced Scott Grix for only his second senior appearance and looked admirably composed from the start, exploited some hesitant defence down Warrington's left to ground the ball in an Atkins tackle.
(19) A statement issued by the North Korean military warned that it would carry out "strong physical retaliations without hesitation if South Korean warmongers carry out reckless military provocations".
(20) Transsexuals who had not undergone surgery, although it had been offered to them providing they fulfilled the usual requirements, were classified into various subgroups, measured according to their attitude towards sex reassignment surgery: they were transsexuals with an unaltered wish for surgery, transsexuals who were ambivalent towards surgery (hesitating patients), and transsexuals who had relinquished their wish for surgery and lived in the initial gender role.