What's the difference between contemptuous and sardonic?

Contemptuous


Definition:

  • (a.) Manifesting or expressing contempt or disdain; scornful; haughty; insolent; disdainful.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) He was contemptuous of Nelson’s small target strategy even in the early years in opposition, insisting voters always needed to know what a party stood for, and that it should stand for big ideas.
  • (2) Sly, underhanded, contemptuous, mendacious, double-dealing, cheating democracy.
  • (3) He dictates the next rally and when Murray decides to go for another lob, Dimitrov is on to the ruse and swats a contemptuous smash away to seal the first set that flashed by in the blink of an eye!
  • (4) (Of course, she was also perfectly aware of the feminist content, what it said about the disgusted-attracted-contemptuous male gaze, but she preferred the art to ask the questions, discomfit, not preach.)
  • (5) Thatcher was contemptuous of "the centre ground" and withering about consensus politics, holding it to be responsible for Britain's postwar decline and believing it to be a recipe for getting nothing done.
  • (6) It held its first national congress in Algiers, and although it was contemptuous of existing political organisations, Poujade made his own political party, Union et Fraternité Française.
  • (7) His enemies argue that he divided Europe by launching an illegal war; he kept the UK out of the eurozone and the Schengen agreement ; he is contemptuous of democracy (surely a qualification?
  • (8) It is rife with secrecy, top-down managerial manipulation, impervious to any outside scrutiny, contemptuous of any questioning, and has embraced extensive surveillance and discriminatory policing of religious and racial minorities.
  • (9) Photograph: AAP In her famous 1913 pamphlet, Round about a pound a week , Maud Pember Reeves wrote contemptuously about “the gospel of porridge” – the idea, still common among the wealthy, that the destitute wouldn’t be so wretched if only they invested their money wisely.
  • (10) Norte Energia officials are privately contemptuous.
  • (11) The voices (which by this time had multiplied and become much more aggressive) were witheringly contemptuous about this: "You can't even SPELL schizophrenia," one of them said, "So what the hell are you going to do about having it?!"
  • (12) Facebook Twitter Pinterest The words returned to haunt Renzi for weeks afterwards, in the fitting form, for this most Twitter-friendly of premiers, of contemptuous hashtags and YouTube satire.
  • (13) Judge Alistair McCreath said: "When a defendant makes a considered decision to abscond as you did he or she has shown a contemptuous disregard for that important obligation and that in itself matters."
  • (14) "If it is false, it is libellous; if it is true, it is contemptuous," he added.
  • (15) He was contemptuous of the way a powerful lobby had manipulated Jewish American opinion, although this compared with the way "the Greek, Armenian, Ukrainian and Irish diasporas have all played an unhealthy role in perpetuating ethnic exclusivism and nationalist prejudice in the countries of their forebears".
  • (16) But a decade ago, executive leadership fell into the hands of people obsessed with "get big quick" and openly contemptuous of co-operative values.
  • (17) The campaign, according to Graham, ignored focus group research that showed people were contemptuous of the idea that electoral reform would prevent corruption.
  • (18) "He doesn't do anything that presidents do, he doesn't worry about any of the things the presidents do, but he has the White House, he has enormous power, and he'll go down in history as the president – and I suspect that he's pretty contemptuous of the rest of us."
  • (19) Delivering the prestigious Hugh Cudlipp lecture, Dacre harangued what he dubbed the "subsidariat" of newspapers - in which he included the Times and the Guardian - which do not turn a profit and are "consumed by the kind of political correctness that is patronisingly contemptuous of what it describes as ordinary people".
  • (20) Whatever I asked him about, he was fantastically hostile and contemptuous.

Sardonic


Definition:

  • (a.) Forced; unnatural; insincere; hence, derisive, mocking, malignant, or bitterly sarcastic; -- applied only to a laugh, smile, or some facial semblance of gayety.
  • (a.) Of, pertaining to, or resembling, a kind of linen made at Colchis.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) It’s a sardonic but good-natured account of being non-white in modern Australia.
  • (2) Harrison Ford (Han Solo) had had a small part in George Lucas's American Grafitti, but was working as a carpenter when he was cast as the sardonic space smuggler, and Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia) had appeared briefly in the 1975 Warren Beatty comedy Shampoo.
  • (3) In the digital era, Hill and his team can sample and sardonically alter material in the week it is transmitted.
  • (4) People talk the same way about Angela Chase, the sardonic and sentimental heroine of My So-Called Life , the teen TV series that began Danes's career in 1994.
  • (5) The king sardonically replies that it would in fact make people merely acquire the appearance of wisdom, and that it would make them forgetful of how to remember.
  • (6) Entertainment Weekly later reported that sardonic space smuggler Solo and bounty hunter Fett would also get their own films, and there have also been hints that Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine could return.
  • (7) Han definitely shoots first (and asks questions later) Lucas and fans have debated for decades whether the sardonic space scoundrel was originally intended to shoot bounty hunter Greedo only after the alien fired his blaster first in the Mos Eisley Cantina in 1977’s saga opener A New Hope, but Abrams clearly has no such qualms about showing the elder Solo as a quick-on-the-draw kind of guy.
  • (8) The Han Solo film will reportedly portray a younger version of the sardonic space smuggler, and will be set in the period between 2005 prequel movie Revenge of the Sith and the film that introduced the character, 1977's Star Wars .
  • (9) The Daily Mail wondered sardonically last week what they talked about over breakfast.
  • (10) I don’t know where they will find a place for the replay, maybe in a morning when we play in an afternoon,” said the sardonic Liverpool manager following his team’s ninth game in 29 days.
  • (11) The Oscar-winning Welsh actor has joined a cast that already includes Toby Jones and Bill Nighy in the lead roles of pompous Captain Mainwaring and his sardonic second-in-command Sergeant Wilson, the roles made famous by Arthur Lowe and John Le Mesurier in Jimmy Perry and David Croft’s original TV show.
  • (12) 3.26pm GMT A rather sardonic take on Chris Smith’s announcement that the dredging of the Somerset levels should start.
  • (13) One sardonic comment on Twitter summed up the widespread reaction: " There are no black men in Plymouth ," observed Chris Terry.
  • (14) Sardonic recoil against them (as in Shem's novel House of God) by residents--a professionally sanctioned response, deflecting what might otherwise be unendurable demands on their varied quotas of pity.
  • (15) "Well," a sudden, sardonic smile, "it is, but with enormous amounts of irony.
  • (16) A younger version of Solo will instead return in a new spin-off , tipped to appear in 2018, with Dave Franco, Logan Lerman and Scott Eastwood reportedly among the frontrunners to play the sardonic space scoundrel.
  • (17) While Jimmy Kimmel’s success is built on his sardonic wit, Corden doesn’t seem to have a cynical bone in his body.
  • (18) Felipe Gonzalez, the former Spanish social democratic prime minister, remarked sardonically the other day that when he was a lad Franco claimed his was the Third Way between capitalism and communism(4).
  • (19) Harrison Ford has confirmed for the first time that he expects to return as sardonic space smuggler Han Solo in Disney's forthcoming new Star Wars film.
  • (20) Mark of Cain, that is,” he said, in his aggressively sardonic Stirling-accented way.