What's the difference between daub and smother?

Daub


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To smear with soft, adhesive matter, as pitch, slime, mud, etc.; to plaster; to bedaub; to besmear.
  • (v. t.) To paint in a coarse or unskillful manner.
  • (v. t.) To cover with a specious or deceitful exterior; to disguise; to conceal.
  • (v. t.) To flatter excessively or glossy.
  • (v. t.) To put on without taste; to deck gaudily.
  • (v. i.) To smear; to play the flatterer.
  • (n.) A viscous, sticky application; a spot smeared or dabed; a smear.
  • (n.) A picture coarsely executed.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) He went from minstrel show to blackface, from vaudeville to Broadway before he hit a fabulous prosperity as the most sentimental of all sentimental singers, a poor Russian cantor's son daubed with burnt cork and down on one knee sobbing for the "mammy" he had never known in a south that nobody ever knew.
  • (2) Marc Lanza has been cooking all morning a Provençal daube, in one of Olney's favourite red-wine reductions, and its rich flavour fills the farmhouse kitchen that has been preserved just as Olney created it.
  • (3) To underline the semi-communal vibe, the phrase "We're all in this together" has been daubed in various locations, and there are yurts for massages near the herb garden.
  • (4) The health debate in the US is taking an ugly turn with Barack Obama and other Democrats pushing reform being compared with Nazis and one congressman having a swastika daubed outside his office.
  • (5) More often than not in Perlman's career it has been swaddled, daubed, be-horned, encrusted and variously garlanded with the work of the great pioneering makeup technicians of the last 30 years, including Rick Baker, Dick Smith and Stan Winston (Perlman is, all else apart, a crucial figure in the history of movie makeup).
  • (6) I congratulated him on the upsurge in his fortunes, such as his sideways move from squeezing, baking and daubing his filthy and infantile clay urns into broadcasting on the prestigious Channel 4 network.
  • (7) Around this mere handful of works by its hero – which do at least include his sumptuous The Garden of Love (c 1635) and his vulnerable, shivering nude the Venus Frigida (1614) – the curators have strung together a fragile daisy chain of prints, copies and daubs of dubious relevance, and sometimes very poor quality.
  • (8) The graffiti here says: ‘Homeland is racist.’ Photograph: Courtesy of the artists In the second episode of the fifth season, which aired in the US and Australia earlier this week, and will be shown in the UK on Sunday, lead character Carrie Mathison, played by Claire Danes, can be seen striding past a wall daubed with Arabic script reading: “Homeland is racist.” Other slogans painted on the walls of the fictional Syrian refugee camp included “Homeland is a joke, and it didn’t make us laugh” and “#blacklivesmatter”, the artists – Heba Amin, Caram Kapp and Stone – said in a statement published online.
  • (9) You can’t treat us like this.” Graffiti denouncing Ahok – as he is known to friend and foe alike – is daubed across the walls here.
  • (10) Photograph: Eamonn Mccabe for the Guardian When she was a child living in a Tudor cottage in rural Cheshire, the walls were lumpy, and badly painted, wattle and daub.
  • (11) As we talk at the Posk centre, which has been cleaned of the graffiti daubed on it last week, journalists from around the world inspect the vases of flowers from local well-wishers and the memorials in the lobby to fallen Polish heroes from the second world war, during which 2,408 Polish airmen alone were killed.
  • (12) The Arabic letter "N" for Nasrani (Christians) was daubed on the doors of houses – to show that they had been seized as the property of the Islamic state declared by Isis.
  • (13) By the second page of A Dragon Apparent, one already knows that his reputation as a stylist is safe: "On the morning of the fourth day the dawn light daubed our faces as we came down the skies of Cochin-China .
  • (14) Many of the windows were smashed and "Revolution HQ" was daubed in black paint on its stone Stalinist facade.
  • (15) "May the Lord keep you in good health for a long time, with love," stated a typical, anonymous, message addressed to Messina Denaro, daubed last year in large letters on a wall by a road heading out of town.
  • (16) On the hill above Christ Church, for example, the pretty little Mount Zion Primitive Methodist church is a graffiti-daubed mess, its windows bricked up, its doors barred.
  • (17) It always has been for Abbado: as a child during the war in Milan, he daubed the motto "Viva Bartók!"
  • (18) Norman says the one she uses most often is the daube de boeuf, "which works for everybody and is so good".
  • (19) Several other countries are now planning to introduce plain packaging, following Australia – legislation last week in Ireland, and now the UK,” its president, Mike Daube, said.
  • (20) An Ann Summers' shop window was smashed on Wardour Street, with "Fuck the police" graffiti daubed on its walls.

Smother


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To destroy the life of by suffocation; to deprive of the air necessary for life; to cover up closely so as to prevent breathing; to suffocate; as, to smother a child.
  • (v. t.) To affect as by suffocation; to stife; to deprive of air by a thick covering, as of ashes, of smoke, or the like; as, to smother a fire.
  • (v. t.) Hence, to repress the action of; to cover from public view; to suppress; to conceal; as, to smother one's displeasure.
  • (v. i.) To be suffocated or stifled.
  • (v. i.) To burn slowly, without sufficient air; to smolder.
  • (v. t.) Stifling smoke; thick dust.
  • (v. t.) A state of suppression.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) As attorneys who practice asylum law, we believe deeply in our nation’s obligation to provide real protection to refugees, but the Obama administration’s willful disregard of existing asylum laws and procedures – and its smothering of due process with detention and rapid deportation – is truly appalling.
  • (2) Brad Guzan produced a superb save to deny Ayew, rushing off his line to smother a left-foot shot from six yards out, and 33 seconds later the Swansea forward’s brother had the ball in the net at the other end.
  • (3) Conveniently, it is not far from the Via Algarviana , allowing us to leave the car and hike the stretch to Alte (16km), passing shuttered houses smothered in creepers in old, abandoned villages.
  • (4) Buffon's understudy Marchetti gets down brilliantly to smother the cross.
  • (5) Instead, the least attractive aspects of London 2012, the ZiL lanes and the Visa-only policy and McDonald's and Coca-Cola as purveyors of sustenance to a sporting nation, were smothered not only by the competition but by the ocean of good humour fostered by the joviality of the volunteers, the inspirational architecture and the attention given to the natural landscape (with apologies to those who had to move to make room for it all).
  • (6) Later, when it was realised that pieces of aluminium and magnesium among this waste could catch fire and cause widespread contamination, inert argon gas had to be pumped in to smother potential blazes.
  • (7) Updated at 5.30pm BST 5.13pm BST Game and second set to Roger Federer Rewind the clocks and smother the future , the venerable Roger Federer isn't Wimbledon history yet.
  • (8) Our descent into Delhi was delayed because of fog, we were told, but the nicotine-coloured blanket smothering this dynamic Indian city was a malignant smog.
  • (9) Bayern are braced for their visitors to employ similar tactics to those that deflated Barcelona in their semi-final, a smothering defence and bite on the break game-plan that has drawn local criticism in print from Günter Netzer and Matthias Sammer.
  • (10) The wall of ice that rises behind Sermilik fjord stretches for 1,500 miles (2,400km) from north to south and smothers 80% of this country.
  • (11) The decision by the MP for Mid Bedfordshire to become the first serving MP to take part in the show, which features famous faces performing in stunts that in the past have included being smothered in insects and eating a kangaroo's penis, could keep her from parliamentary and constituency business for a month.
  • (12) Hazard is sent off for kicking the ball under a ballboy attempting to smother the ball rather than return it.
  • (13) The forward bustled in, stealing the ball and holding off the centre-half as he attempted to wrest it back, before ripping a glorious shot from a horribly tight angle into the far top corner as Ben Foster edged out to smother.
  • (14) He's never quite in control, though, and his attempted lift into the net is smothered by the outrushing Ospina.
  • (15) Before he came to the UK, Darius trained in Poland, learning how to perform a cut-throat shave by smothering an inflated balloon in shaving foam and then removing it with a single blade.
  • (16) Sediment can smother seagrasses, which are the key food source of dugongs and sea turtles, and damage corals.
  • (17) White supremacy in America won’t let our black young children be kids, swim or receive congratulations while graduating without having the breath, light and life smothered right out of them.
  • (18) Liverpool had threatened only sporadically, although Kasper Schmeichel did make a decent save to smother Coutinho’s shot.
  • (19) The Quagga mussel ( Dreissena rostriformis bugensis ), which was found in the river Wraysbury on 1 October and can cover boat hulls and smother native mussels to death, is just one of a group of freshwater species that has been spreading westward from the Ponto-Caspian region in south-east Europe in recent years and which risk causing a “meltdown” as they invade Britain.
  • (20) It added: "We have long argued that stamp duty is a tax on aspiration that smothered the natural demand of the market.