What's the difference between culpa and fault?

Culpa


Definition:

  • (n.) Negligence or fault, as distinguishable from dolus (deceit, fraud), which implies intent, culpa being imputable to defect of intellect, dolus to defect of heart.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Yvonne Roberts: Mea culpa is journalism's dry rot You are right, Lucy, the best confessional writing has a universal truth.
  • (2) When I ask both brothers about the incontrovertible blemishes on the last government's record, the policy of locking up children at Yarl's Wood, say, or the cavernous gap between executive reward and the minimum wage, they offer vague mea culpas.
  • (3) Journalist Tim Brannigan responded witheringly to her mea culpa.
  • (4) Hillary Clinton’s mea culpa at the United Nations on Tuesday was supposed to tamp down the scandal over her use of a private email address as secretary of state.
  • (5) Either he says "mea culpa" and resigns, almost certainly precipitating a general election; or he condemns the ledgers as fabrications, the work of a vengeful Bárcenas angry about taking the fall for a practice that allegedly all were party to.
  • (6) But in a carefully argued speech, Mr Blair also issued a "mea culpa", saying New Labour began by trying to influence the media too much.
  • (7) Of course, this rite of passage often resulted in being hoiked to the deputy head's office for much mea culpa-ing in response to the empty threat of a letter home, but that was all part of it.
  • (8) The only queue to be found was for Nick Clegg’s book -signing, with many of the 300 or so clutching two or three copies of his non mea culpa in their hands.
  • (9) In a world where we celebrate legally acquired “marginal gains” in high-performance sport but rightly damn those who fall foul of anti-doping rules that fall the other side of the line, Sharapova’s dramatic mea culpa raises some pretty tough questions, not only for the Russian tennis player but also for sport more generally.
  • (10) News International's humiliating mea culpa on phone hacking has again placed Brooks firmly in her enemies' cross hairs.
  • (11) Malcolm Turnbull has attempted to arrest the bloodletting inside the Coalition with a full mea culpa on the election campaign and a message to conservatives that it was Tony Abbott who laid the groundwork for Labor’s successful offensive on Medicare .
  • (12) Sterling himself has already begun his mea culpa media tour but not even Oprah herself could redeem Sterling's image at the moment, not that she would be financially or emotionally motivated to do so if she wants to be part of the new Clippers ownership .
  • (13) One result, which has had consequences that no one anticipated, was the reckless pledge about tuition fees, the subject of the pre-conference mea culpa by Mr Clegg.
  • (14) In Opinion, the former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie comes out as a pro-immigration enthusiast, the actor and writer Meera Syal remembers growing up as a daughter of migrants, and the economist Paul Ormerod argues that the left has got it wrong on immigration, while the former home secretary David Blunkett offers a mea culpa of his own.
  • (15) The Commission for Social Justice, which had been established by the late John Smith to rethink Labour's social and economic policies, tended to use the terms social security and welfare interchangeably (mea culpa as a member of the CSJ for not realising the significance of this at the time).
  • (16) As for Bissinger, he is now beating his chest about his own pathetic gullibility, in a way that curiously seems to mirror the grand mea culpa that Armstrong will perform on Oprah.
  • (17) If there is something wrong with building a company from two people to 194,000 people where 600,000 people depend on WPP for their livelihoods then mea culpa.” A small shareholder said questions on pay were pathetic and asked by small-minded people.
  • (18) In Britain, Caitlin Moran penned a witty mea culpa last year, retracting her negative review of the first season, claiming: "I made a mistake, I didn't get it.
  • (19) Ed Balls has issued some mea culpas in public and in private is more frank about how Labour failed.
  • (20) I had expected the book to be a mea culpa , an attempt to win people over, and it is in part.

Fault


Definition:

  • (n.) Defect; want; lack; default.
  • (n.) Anything that fails, that is wanting, or that impairs excellence; a failing; a defect; a blemish.
  • (n.) A moral failing; a defect or dereliction from duty; a deviation from propriety; an offense less serious than a crime.
  • (n.) A dislocation of the strata of the vein.
  • (n.) In coal seams, coal rendered worthless by impurities in the seam; as, slate fault, dirt fault, etc.
  • (n.) A lost scent; act of losing the scent.
  • (n.) Failure to serve the ball into the proper court.
  • (v. t.) To charge with a fault; to accuse; to find fault with; to blame.
  • (v. t.) To interrupt the continuity of (rock strata) by displacement along a plane of fracture; -- chiefly used in the p. p.; as, the coal beds are badly faulted.
  • (v. i.) To err; to blunder, to commit a fault; to do wrong.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) If Cory Bernardi wasn’t currently in a period of radio silence as he contemplates his immediate political future he’d be all over this too, mining the Trumpocalypse – or in our domestic context, mining the fertile political fault line where Coalition support intersects with One Nation support.
  • (2) The most common seenario was a vehicle-vehicle collision in which seat belts were not used and the decedent or the decedent's driver was at fault.
  • (3) The venture capitalist argued in his report, commissioned by the Downing Street policy guru Steve Hilton, in favour of "compensated no fault-dismissal" for small businesses.
  • (4) As he told us: 'Individual faults and frailties are no excuse to give in and no exemption from the common obligation to give of ourselves.'
  • (5) Whatever their other faults, most Republicans running for office this year do not share Trump’s unwillingness to condemn the Ku Klux Klan.
  • (6) There could be no faulting the atmosphere or the football drama.
  • (7) People think it must be your fault that you’re in this position; it isn’t.
  • (8) Defense Mechanism Test applied to a subgroup of 20 patients suggested that high perceptual defense may be related to injury occurrence in patients at fault for the accident.
  • (9) Yes, if it helps kill the idea that autism is somebody's "fault".
  • (10) The SEM photographs demonstrated the faults which can be eliminated by the use of a stereomicroscope and showed also those which derive from the physical and chemical properties of the amalgam.
  • (11) He said the incident happened after Hookem told Woolfe it was his own fault he did not get his nomination papers in on time.
  • (12) The result is a very satisfactory isolation of the wound, eliminating faults in aseptic technique but requiring fresh sterilisation for each new procedure.
  • (13) Another issue that deserves attention is the impact on future generations, because biological faults introduced by the technique could be handed down from one generation to the next.
  • (14) I’m not someone to gloss over the BBC’s faults, problems or challenges – I see it as part of my job to identify and pursue them.
  • (15) Despite all these fault lines, China is not going to collapse; it is far too resilient for that.
  • (16) Proper provision of ground-fault circuit interrupter protection, particularly at temporary work sites, could have prevented most of the deaths from 110-volt AC.
  • (17) These achievements, and faults, will find stark contrast with Trump’s administration; certainly Trump’s nominations for key positions in his cabinet that relate to climate change have prompted alarm by experts and campaigners.
  • (18) Cameron did give ground by saying that "no fault dismissal" would only apply to micro companies and not to every employer in the country.
  • (19) The failures were mostly related to technical faults.
  • (20) These more complex units call for new methods of fault detection and diagnosis.