What's the difference between contort and distort?

Contort


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To twist, or twist together; to turn awry; to bend; to distort; to wrest.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Obama warned “a contorted reading of the statute” could mean that “millions of people who are obtaining insurance currently with subsidies, suddenly aren’t getting those subsidies, many of them can’t afford it”.
  • (2) The term dystonia was introduced by Oppenheim and Vogt in 1911 to describe the relatively slow, sustained, frequently forceful contorting movements involving striatal muscles.
  • (3) The most famous image of suffering in the Renaissance was an ancient statue dug up in 1506 of the pagan priest Laocoön being strangled by snakes , his face a contorted image of pure suffering.
  • (4) For in situ hybridization on cytogenetic preparations, the results are excellent, but the procedure is contorted and the probe use is increased.
  • (5) Sprawling across 110 hectares on the outskirts of Milan, this crazed collage of undulating tents, tilting green walls and parametrically-contorted lumps can mean only one thing: Expo 2015, latest in a long and controversial tradition of “world’s fairs”, has landed.
  • (6) He had also grown disillusioned with his own role as a propagandist, his contorted attempt to distinguish between 'honest' and 'dishonest' propaganda evidently having failed.
  • (7) Take out the contortions, exaggerations and outright lies from the standard Trump riff – and you have next to nothing.
  • (8) Putin’s face has contorted and smoothed out so much that it’s at times unrecognisable.
  • (9) The substance of his argument was contorted and at times contradictory, but as a leader rather than an individual he had no choice but to be opaque as he sought to keep his party united.
  • (10) Thus it increased the bulging of endothelial cells and contortion of their nuclei, and further increased the number of surface protrusions and the subendothelial space.
  • (11) Since then, Putin's face has contorted and smoothed out so much that it's at times unrecognisable.
  • (12) We investigated the participation of a sympathetic component in the abdominal contortions induced by intraperitoneal injection of 0.6% acetic acid in the mouse.
  • (13) I was ashamed of having married so early, ashamed of how strange and singular my marriage had been, ashamed of my guilt about it, ashamed of the years of moral contortions I'd undergone on my way to divorce, ashamed of my sexual inexperience, ashamed of what an outrageous and judgmental mother I had, ashamed of being a bleeding and undefended person instead of a tower of remoteness and command and intellect like DeLillo or Pynchon, ashamed to be writing a book that seemed to want to turn on the question of whether an outrageous midwestern mother will get one last Christmas at home with her family.
  • (14) Suddenly, free from contortions of caution, they can bring us the simple truth.
  • (15) There were no statistically significant correlations to any of the following parameters: complication of pregnancy by toxaemia, duration of labour, presence of umbilical cord contortion, perinatal distress, Apgar index, mode of delivery, body weight, body length, ratio of weight to length, and blood glucose.
  • (16) On addition of ATP and other hydrolysable nucleotides the microtubule bundle contorts into a helical configuration, a property we have called 'corkscrewing', before straightening again.
  • (17) Signs of infection in 20 snakes included subcutaneous "lumps," violent contortions, and bloody exudate, apparently from the nares.
  • (18) Jo Appleby, the bones expert who excavated the skeleton and has worked on it for months, said it was contorted by scoliosis, which set in some time after he was 10, from an unknown cause.
  • (19) Suddenly, the election campaign is awash with the main parties' contorted version of political geography: proof, once you've got through the usual fog of Westminster language, that 13 years of Labour government have left the UK's regional, national – and fundamentally economic – divisions all too intact.
  • (20) I didn't take much notice at the time, but just writing that sentence makes my face contort with outrage.

Distort


Definition:

  • (a.) Distorted; misshapen.
  • (v. t.) To twist of natural or regular shape; to twist aside physically; as, to distort the limbs, or the body.
  • (v. t.) To force or put out of the true posture or direction; to twist aside mentally or morally.
  • (v. t.) To wrest from the true meaning; to pervert; as, to distort passages of Scripture, or their meaning.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Findings on plain X-ray of the abdomen, using the usual parameters of psoas and kidney shadows in the Nigerian, indicate that the two communities studied are similar but urinary calculi and urinary tract distortion are significantly more prominent in the community with the higher endemicity of urinary schistosomiasis.
  • (2) Aside from these characteristic findings of HCC, it was important to reveal the following features for the diagnosis of well differentiated type of small HCC: variable thickening or distortion of trabecular structure in association with nuclear crowding, acinar formation, selective cytoplasmic accumulation of Mallory bodies, nuclear abnormalities consisting of thickening of nucleolus, hepatic cords in close contact with bile ducts or blood vessels, and hepatocytes growing in a fibrous environment.
  • (3) Mild, significant improvement was noted in one of the hearing components, "attenuation," and an adverse effect was shown on "distortion," owing to noise.
  • (4) Malema has distorted his leftwing credentials with outrageous behaviour.
  • (5) Radiologists may encounter patients with fixed dental prostheses that may produce image distortion on MRI scans of the face and jaw.
  • (6) However, fractional addressing introduces distortion.
  • (7) The strongest field distortions and attractive forces occurred with 17-7PH stainless steel clips.
  • (8) This raises questions about police integrity and News International's power to distort procedure in a serious criminal matter.
  • (9) However, all these characteristics can be distorted if measured by means of a variable-proportion procedure, in which the amount of one primary is held constant while the amount of the other is varied in order to measure threshold.
  • (10) This could distort the relation between height and forced expiratory volume in 1s (FEV1) as age increases.
  • (11) The expression of such secondary and tertiary syphilis is commonly masked and distorted by the long-term effects of subcurative doses of antibiotics; in fact, late latent and tertiary syphilis produce symptoms and immunosuppression similar to the profile of AIDS.
  • (12) These results confirmed that 'punctuated' labeling was not an artefact due to a distortion of the cell's shape by having been dried on glass slides.
  • (13) The data derived have demonstrated the impairment of the function of the indicated system in the test subjects, associated with sexual behavior impairment in the form of exhibitionism which may form the biological basis for distortion of sexual self-consciousness.
  • (14) The nogalose and aminoglucose sugars lie in the minor and major grooves, respectively, of the distorted B-DNA double helix.
  • (15) The latter, which is external and solvent accessible, is associated with a distortion in the alpha-helix centered around Tyr33 which consists of a significant increase in the CO(i-4)-N(i) and CO(i-4)-NH(i) distances relative to those in the rest of the helix, as well as a significant departure in the phi, psi angles of Tyr33 relative to regular helical geometry.
  • (16) The authors suggest the use of minimal HP filtering so that phase-shift distortion is minimized and a larger response amplitude can be recorded.
  • (17) Fields said: "The assertions that Tom Cruise likened making a movie to being at war in Afghanistan is a gross distortion of the record... What Tom said, laughingly, was that sometimes, 'That's what it feels like.'"
  • (18) Therapeutic application of drugs containing propylene glycol 1.2 as a solvent may distort the results of forensic chemical detection of ethylene glycol from its oxidation products.
  • (19) When a meridional-size lens is used to provide magnification in the horizonal meridan for one eye the resulting stereopsis distortion is readily accounted for in the terms of the binocular disparity caused by changed angular relations.
  • (20) Synchronization of spontaneous otoacoustic emissions to a cubic distortion frequency fs = 2f1-f2 has been studied.