What's the difference between cowardly and pusillanimity?

Cowardly


Definition:

  • (a.) Wanting courage; basely or weakly timid or fearful; pusillanimous; spiritless.
  • (a.) Proceeding from fear of danger or other consequences; befitting a coward; dastardly; base; as, cowardly malignity.
  • (adv.) In the manner of a coward.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) An unprincipled coward with the backbone of an amoeba."
  • (2) But cowardly useful idiots of Warwick have banned @MaryamNamazie.” On Sunday night the union released a statement reversing the decision, which it stated had gone against normal procedures.
  • (3) On Wednesday she declared that if Sir Gideon had sent Chloe Smith unprotected on to Newsnight, then he was "cowardly as well as arrogant".
  • (4) Extensive research among the Afghan National Army – 68 focus groups – and US military personnel alike concluded: "One group sees the other as a bunch of violent, reckless, intrusive, arrogant, self-serving profane, infidel bullies hiding behind high technology; and the other group [the US soldiers] generally views the former as a bunch of cowardly, incompetent, obtuse, thieving, complacent, lazy, pot-smoking, treacherous, and murderous radicals.
  • (5) But in recent years, directors have sought out the likes of Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood ( There Will Be Blood ), the Chemical Brothers ( Hanna ) and Nick Cave ( The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford ).
  • (6) Africans yelled at the police, "Cowards" and "Kill the white men."
  • (7) The only real black spot was that a cowardly Britain stood by in the 1930s and allowed Hitler and Mussolini to help General Franco win the Spanish civil war , pushing it into dictatorship and encouraging Nazi Germany to launch the second world war.
  • (8) It resulted in a royal command performance, a big hit and an Oscar win for Coward.
  • (9) It’s just one in a long line of cowardly and slimy moves by Ryan, who is really just Trump in a more aesthetically appealing wrapper.
  • (10) Though he strongly disapproved of much of what later took shape as "New Labour", which he saw, among other things, as historically cowardly, he was without question the single most influential intellectual forerunner of Labour's increasingly iconoclastic 1990s revisionism.
  • (11) I don’t know who you think you are, you cowardly, small-minded xenophobe who did this, but you do not speak for the community,” he added.
  • (12) An emotional Obama ran through a litany of Isis human-rights abuses, from rape to enslavement, calling them “cowardly acts of violence.” In a vague reference to Americans held captive by Isis or near its path in Iraq, Obama said the US would “do everything we can to protect our people,” a formulation that has preceded US military action in the past.
  • (13) Erase even more, you cowardly regime,” Abo Bakr wrote on a wall in a message to the whitewashers.
  • (14) With Veep , rather than striving young idealists, you have cowardly egomaniacs and bunglers who are involved in endless arse-covering exercises.
  • (15) Some of the strongest criticism came from Travis Tygaart, the head of Usada, who called the cyber attacks “cowardly and despicable” and reiterated that the athletes named had done nothing wrong.
  • (16) But it's fair to say a fondness for sniping games marks me out as a coward who'd rather take potshots from a distance than actually climb down from the tree and enter the fray like a man, a theory backed up by the fact that while I love sniping, I detest "stealth games" (because it's scary when you get caught) and "boss fights" where you have to battle some gargantuan show-off 10 times your height who keeps knocking you on your arse with his tail.
  • (17) With these unmanned craft, governments can fight a coward's war, a god's war, harming only the unnamed.
  • (18) Photograph: Reuters Elizabeth Bourgault, a runner who survived the blasts with injuries, also called Tsarnaev a coward.
  • (19) Conceived as a "response" to Ben Affleck's Oscar-nominated take on the 1979 hostage crisis, it promises a tale of cowardly US diplomats who are treated with kindness and eventually delivered to safety by their Iranian hosts.
  • (20) "I think there is only one explanation about this: that the family has been the victim of repressive measures, which are cruel and cowardly."

Pusillanimity


Definition:

  • (n.) The quality of being pusillanimous; weakness of spirit; cowardliness.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) It is a pusillanimous, jargon-ridden, self-perpetuating proof of Parkinson's law .
  • (2) Is there any Eurosceptic in this pusillanimous cabinet with the guts to speak his mind and put principles and country before personal ambition?” the Mail asks.
  • (3) To be a bystander when one's discipline does offer insights and methods of value discernment is pusillanimous.
  • (4) He was the government’s top Europe adviser at David Cameron’s side throughout Britain’s EU renegotiation, where some accused him of pusillanimity in the face of Brussels intransigence .
  • (5) Result: the normally admirable Mr Grieve risked seeming a pusillanimous ministerial jobsworth unwilling to let the public learn the full truth about our foolish and meddling heir to the throne.
  • (6) But to make that a reason to abandon the policy would be pusillanimous in the extreme.
  • (7) This may be just what ministers' friends say to appease backbench plotters feeling betrayed by the apparent pusillanimity of cabinet failure to jump after Purnell.
  • (8) The Mail made clear its frustration: “Is there any Eurosceptic in this pusillanimous cabinet with the guts to speak his mind and put principles and country before personal ambition?” But while the Times called Boris Johnson “right”, the Sun is expected to take a far tougher line on a man the paper has already outed, along with Michael Gove, as being on the side of in.
  • (9) Britain and France, Europe's two military heavyweights, took the lead on the Libyan intervention in the teeth of outright opposition from Germany and pusillanimity in Washington.
  • (10) Why aren’t these faithless, pusillanimous people retaliating as they should, by surging towards Ukip with cries of revenge against all Muslims?
  • (11) For some, Wapping planted a decisive nail in the coffin of what Andrew Neil, a former Murdoch editor, has described as "all that was wrong with British industry: pusillanimous management, pig-headed unions, crazy restrictive practices, endless strikes and industrial disruption, and archaic technology".
  • (12) But only nine days into his administration, Clinton found himself at a press conference explaining “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, an awkward (and many thought pusillanimous) compromise to permit gays and lesbians to serve in the military.
  • (13) The British government – pusillanimous as ever – thinks it is too sensitive a subject for us to ask the US why it is flouting an international agreement.
  • (14) The question then is, is this pusillanimity on his part?
  • (15) The pusillanimity of the remain campaign’s failure to counter these claims was indefensible.
  • (16) Amid so many humanitarian emergencies, it would be callous of Mr Cameron to pursue this nomination and pusillanimous of the secretary general to accept it.
  • (17) Heads should roll," he wrote on his website, "Isn't it really about time we decent, nice, liberal people stopped being so pusillanimously terrified of being thought 'Islamophobic' and stood up for decent, nice, liberal values?"

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