What's the difference between cursory and perfunctory?

Cursory


Definition:

  • (a.) Running about; not stationary.
  • (a.) Characterized by haste; hastily or superficially performed; slight; superficial; careless.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) All of these are accomplished simultaneously with a cursory survey to identify immediately life-threatening injuries and to prevent permanent disability.
  • (2) It is clear that any investigations they have conducted have been cursory.
  • (3) A cursory web search would have helped but fewer of us bother when the news is relatively inconsequential.
  • (4) A cursory glance at human history suggests otherwise.
  • (5) A cursory trawl reveals a long list of employment tribunals and strikes by low-paid workers in these outsourcing companies.
  • (6) Further, it only takes a cursory look at Hizb ut-Tahrir’s website to see that they are embroiled in a bitter and ongoing feud with Isis.
  • (7) The statements to this point only give a cursory review of the beginning (20 years) of the kinetic approach to the classification of lipoproteins and subsystems which are involved in their synthesis and metabolism.
  • (8) Morphological differences are primarily related to locomotor patterns as reflected in the degree of cursoriality displayed by bovids in different habitats.
  • (9) In the past, says Hogan, they tended only to give them a cursory glance.
  • (10) Writer Feargus O’Sullivan thinks of the presence of artists and creative workers as adding a “cursory sheen to a place’s transformation”, describing the process as “ artwashing ”.
  • (11) But it was as much their mistakes as those of Moyes that led them to Tuesday's cursory announcement .
  • (12) In this chapter, while we review in a cursory way the older findings with glucocorticoid hormones, we concentrate on the newer developments which suggest that leukocyte- and pituitary-derived ACTH and endorphins perform regulatory functions within and between the immune system and the pituitary-adrenocortical axis.
  • (13) Yes, the ad included such issues as agriculture and the environment, but only the most cursory mention.
  • (14) The UK's cursory submission to the commission is in fact based on a February 2012 report titled Creating the Conditions for Integration .
  • (15) If anyone doubts that people do not care enough about wildlife then a cursory look at the emails, tweets, letters and calls that have flooded into the RSPB in recent days will open their eyes.
  • (16) The text which has to be easily understandable, mentions: a cursory description of the clinical signs of the different decompression accidents the measures which have to be taken in each case, depending on: the moment of the emergency: after or during decompression, the presence of an insufficient decompression, or a "blow-up".
  • (17) We didn’t actually fully investigate them, we just made a cursory visit and went back to all of our keyboards looking at everybody’s emails and text messages.
  • (18) I don’t think that a cursory look at the budget is enough for people to understand what we’re really getting at.
  • (19) According to one survey, just 4% of women do this, and a cursory glance around the globe hints it is not exactly common practice elsewhere.
  • (20) This is only a cursory view of the complexities one encounters when attempting to understand women, how and why they behave the way they do, how they respond to the health care system, what some of their influences are, and what we must all do together to help them help themselves and us, to provide them with a longer, more productive, rewarding and healthy life span.

Perfunctory


Definition:

  • (a.) Done merely to get rid of a duty; performed mechanically and as a thing of rote; done in a careless and superficial manner; characterized by indifference; as, perfunctory admonitions.
  • (a.) Hence: Mechanical; indifferent; listless; careless.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The apparent lack of "anything to do" can discourage physicians from attempting anything more than perfunctory management of these cases.
  • (2) Refugees scramble for ways into Europe as Hungary seals borders Read more Habbal was one of at least 16 applicants to be rejected on Tuesday, and he claimed that each person was turned down in a maximum 20 minutes, after a series of perfunctory questions about their country of origin and route to Hungary.
  • (3) From the peak of potential perfection you descend down through "going to the toilet with the door open", past "perfunctory sex" and into "cold, dead stares across the breakfast table".
  • (4) The visit though will remain perfunctory, reflecting the troubled relationship.
  • (5) Instead it pushed through Lord Mandelson's wrong-headed digital economy bill, which only got its perfunctory Commons second reading yesterday, as well as the unavoidable budget resolutions.
  • (6) Social care is in crisis, leaving half a million frail old people with no care at all, while others get notoriously perfunctory 15-minute home visits or often squalid residential care.
  • (7) You could never accuse Frank Lowy of not caring enough about Australian football, but in his press conference announcing Postecoglou as coach there was a warmth and an avuncularity that had been missing in his more perfunctory public interactions with Osieck, Verbeek and even Hiddink.
  • (8) In a brilliant coincidence, he was also there to collect them all, rewarding all the fans who voted on social media with a fairly perfunctory performance of What Do You Mean?
  • (9) The process for deciding that the war was legal is described as “perfunctory” by the inquiry, while “no formal record was made of that decision, and the precise grounds on which it was made remains unclear”.
  • (10) These were the days when, other than perfunctory call-ups by prison staff, there was little focus on the motivations behind so-called offending behaviour.
  • (11) "The North's film-makers are just doing perfunctory work.
  • (12) Nursing home physicians are often unprepared to make psychiatric diagnoses, and a perfunctory annual psychiatric evaluation is insufficient to manage the complex depression syndromes of nursing home residents.
  • (13) If this could be attained, the hours in a hospital on rounds or at lectures would be better spent and ultimately, the speaker, too, would derive more satisfaction from his work if he were rewarded with stimulating questions from an appreciative audience instead of the perfunctory applause of somnolent, noncomprehending colleagues, driven almost to distraction by unending cacolalia complicated by lightning speed and rank inaudibility.
  • (14) Savile was given only a "perfunctory" interview, conducted on his terms at Stoke Mandeville ("not good practice") and with a friend present, about whose status officers did not inquire.
  • (15) All the approaches to Baghdad are defended by a mix of state security forces and Shia militiamen, most of whom have had several perfunctory days of training before being dispatched to the frontline.
  • (16) He's saying that the EIB is "part of the Brussels racket"; that BA was a major recipient of the bank's soft loans because it tried to steer Britain into the euro (must have been a bad job); that "everyone knows" that Britain is in a worse economic state than everyone else (oddly enough he cites Brussels as a source) and that our "wooden and perfunctory" PM is "pathologically incapable" of apologising for his mistakes.
  • (17) The inquiry also heard how Dorrell thought the framework for the fledgling PCC, which was set up in 1991, was "vague", "perfunctory" and lacking in any "real sanctions".
  • (18) The news is heartbreaking for the families involved and it will be scarcely believable for these hospitals and GPs who are doing their best to deliver services despite the neglect of the government.” He said that Hunt’s statement to MPs last July was “perfunctory, complacent and evasive, failing to reveal any of the catastrophic detail of how 500,000 pieces of correspondence including test and screening results and pathways following hospital treatment, had failed to be delivered and were in fact languishing unopened in a warehouse”.
  • (19) There’s a terrific documentary about one such case, the Detroit band Death whose sole album was released in a perfunctory edition in, I believe, 1975 and disappeared until a copy of it was digitised and made public on the internet.
  • (20) Most important, the history and physical examination are often perfunctory and the patient undergoes a number of contrast and imaging studies, endoscopic procedures, and laboratory investigations which may still be non-diagnostic.