(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.
Scrupulous
Definition:
(a.) Full ofscrupules; inclined to scruple; nicely doubtful; hesitating to determine or to act, from a fear of offending or of doing wrong.
(a.) Careful; cautious; exact; nice; as, scrupulous abstinence from labor; scrupulous performance of duties.
(a.) Given to making objections; captious.
(a.) Liable to be doubted; doubtful; nice.
Example Sentences:
(1) Life-threatening or lethal toxicity was encountered when these phenomena were not scrupulously observed.
(2) Invariably in these films the visuals are scrupulously authentic, but the "message" is very much in line with the values of their human creators.
(3) A plea is made for scrupulous care to avoid starch powder contamination of the operative field.
(4) And yet, according to his widow Sheila Ravenscroft, this photograph documents the first stage in a complicated and scrupulous filing system that Peel had maintained for his record collection since 1969.
(5) He is always scrupulous to keep his views to himself and enjoys the respect of politicians of all stripes, who recognise the skills of a top operator.
(6) Bernie Sanders has scrupulously avoided throwing punches at political rivals during a career that has lasted close to half a century .
(7) Telling an institution to “keep its mouth shut” is, quite simply, a threat – entirely different from expressing the hope that the media might want to temper its criticism and scrupulously check its facts.
(8) However, he added: “We are going to be scrupulous in investigating cases where we are concerned about the impartiality and accountability that is taking place.” Earlier this week, Obama hosted a White House summit to deal with the fallout from the unrest in Ferguson and concerns about police brutality and stereotyping that the president said have resonated in communities across the country.
(9) Infection is a potential risk in diabetic men using intracavernosal injection therapy and those offered it should be informed of the importance of a scrupulous sterile technique and the need to seek urgent medical help for decompression if an erection persists for more than 4-6 h.
(10) Of course, even though we brights will scrupulously insist that our word is a noun, if it catches on it is likely to follow gay and eventually re-emerge as a new adjective.
(11) This favourable series demonstrates that nowadays with the improved technology and with a scrupulous pharmacological protocol transluminal coronary angioplasty can be performed with a low incidence of complications and excellent results, further assessing its high potential in the treatment of ischemic coronary artery disease.
(12) Even with the most scrupulous IUD insertion technics, uterine perforation is a recognized complication.
(13) The live footage on the sports channel ESPN was scrupulously presented in line with post-Reithian attitudes to the depiction of private crisis: as soon as it became apparent that Muamba was in extremis, the camera pulled back to a long, high angle, which showed only a distant huddle.
(14) These findings indicate the importance of scrupulous hand washing before and after handling each infant and of enforcement of other basic nursery techniques.
(15) One critic, for example, in a very patient, and indeed in every respect but one a positively scrupulous, reading of one of Eliot's anti-semitic poems, "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar," glancingly commented, "the question whether [it is] anti-semitic is obviously not a pressing one".
(16) From analysis of the results of scrupulous examination of 66 patients with pathological shadows up to 3 cm in diameter found in the lungs during X-ray examination the authors established that peripheral carcinoma of the lung accounts for 65.2% of all asymptomatic accidentally revealed structures in the lungs.
(17) In the absence of added Mg2+ untreated tRNA was acylated in the presence of spermine, but tRNA from which Mg2+ had been scrupulously removed was not.
(18) Each stone is then carefully cleaned by hand and scrupulously recorded before being put into storage.
(19) The results of our study indicate that a more scrupulous enforcement of legislative measures concerning anti-tetanus vaccination is recommended.
(20) Recommended biography Wodehouse: A Life by Robert McCrum (2004) is a masterly study of Wodehouse's achievement, and includes a scrupulous and clear-eyed examination of the wartime scandal which dispenses with much of the accumulated hyperbole.