What's the difference between drivel and prattle?

Drivel


Definition:

  • (v. i.) To slaver; to let spittle drop or flow from the mouth, like a child, idiot, or dotard.
  • (v. i.) To be weak or foolish; to dote; as, a driveling hero; driveling love.
  • (n.) Slaver; saliva flowing from the mouth.
  • (n.) Inarticulate or unmeaning utterance; foolish talk; babble.
  • (n.) A driveler; a fool; an idiot.
  • (n.) A servant; a drudge.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The 2010 manifesto , which Farage has called "drivel", called for taxi drivers to be required to wear uniforms, dress codes for the theatre and for the Circle line on London's underground to be made a circle again.
  • (2) The flame is never extinguished.” Olympic flame extinguished by Rio protesters Seeking comfort in drivel Alexis Petridis considers Khloe Kardashian’s thoughts on vitamin E vaginal oil, topless model Katie Price’s “double-bum selfie”, or the news that Kris Jenner refused to visit Cuba with the Kardashian brood.
  • (3) Suzanne Evans, the party policy chief, confirmed the U-turn as she set out how the manifesto would be a much more serious document than the 2010 one, which was later dismissed by Farage as nonsense and drivel.
  • (4) The authors compared nine manic patients exhibiting formal thought disorders (tangentiality, neologisms, drivelling, private use of words, and paraphasias) with 102 manic patients without these thought disorders and with 31 schizophrenic patients.
  • (5) Nigel Farage rightly dismissed Ukip's 2010 election manifesto as total drivel, then tried to distance himself from such nonsense as bringing in uniforms for taxi drivers, until it emerged he'd written the foreword.
  • (6) In 51 years working in the City of London rarely have I heard such drivel spoken by senior politicians, trade union leaders and fully paid-up members of the bleeding-heart club over the valuation of the Royal Mail's flotation .
  • (7) They are bolstered by nonsense economics and spun out by thinktanks endowed for the specific purpose of mainstreaming drivel through relentless repetition.
  • (8) Ever since this exhibitionist drivel began, otherwise sentient people have been sobbing into their popcorn about thwarted love and the passing of time.
  • (9) Who needs a programme in which no one believes, even one that its leader thinks is drivel, when preaching the language of betrayal brings a warm glow of recognition to a swath of the electorate.
  • (10) Despite sitting for 50 hours of taped interviews – scarcely credible, I know, given the drivel that follows – Julian decided there was no point in making himself look like an unstable, megalomaniac dickhead as his entire advance had been pocketed by his lawyers.
  • (11) By applying an intelligence-led model and working with our partner agencies across the border continuum,” this Matrix-induced drivel goes on, “we deliver effective border control over who and what has the right to enter or exit, and under what conditions.” Other than the weird licence such words give to find and punish evil, well, anywhere – hot spots of global people smuggling such as Flinders Lane, my pub, your cafe – the last two clauses, eerily echo John Howard’s infamous 2001 speech in which he declared: “But we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.” Only now, it seems they seem to want to decide a whole lot more about us all.
  • (12) Prefiguring attitudes now associated with John Humphrys and Jeremy Paxman, Robinson succeeded in breaking through what he called the "sonorous drivel" of politicians, of whom he once said: "It's impossible to make the bastards reply to a straight question."
  • (13) Daniel Taylor The hour before every England match when Arsenal's pitch-announcer, Paul Burrell, subjected us to all that boneheaded drivel – "think of 1966" and "are we ready?"
  • (14) Last week Farage had to confess that the party's 2010 manifesto was "drivel" , with its pledges to repaint trains in traditional colours, to bring back "proper dress" at the theatre and to investigate discrimination against white people at the BBC.
  • (15) Nigel Farage disowned it (“drivel”) and the man who wrote it has long since rejoined the Tory party.
  • (16) So much of Wolf's work is utter drivel – and I say this as someone in possession of the sacred feminine "force".
  • (17) On the idiocy, waste and vacuous drivel that constitutes “the case for Trident”, he has been right.
  • (18) Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nigel Farage's attempt to distance himself from the "drivel" and "nonsense" in Ukip's policy documents at the last election was undermined on Friday after it emerged he wrote the foreword to the party's manifesto and helped to launch it at an event in London.
  • (19) The series of general frequency shows: driveling 67.9%, desultory thinking 57.3%, withdrawal, broadcasting, insertion 32.7%, loosening of association, gaps, derailment 28.9%, blocking 16.5%, transitoriness, movielike thinking, double-sense thinking 12.0%.
  • (20) Everyone can see it for the climate denier drivel it is.

Prattle


Definition:

  • (v. i.) To talk much and idly; to prate; hence, to talk lightly and artlessly, like a child; to utter child's talk.
  • (v. t.) To utter as prattle; to babble; as, to prattle treason.
  • (n.) Trifling or childish tattle; empty talk; loquacity on trivial subjects; prate; babble.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The talk coming from senior Tories – at least some of whom have the grace to squirm when questioned on this topic – suggesting that it's all terribly complicated, that it was a long time ago and that even SS members were, in some ways, themselves victims, is uncomfortably close to the kind of prattle we used to hear from those we called Holocaust revisionists.
  • (2) An immensely cerebral man, who trained himself to need only six hours of sleep - believing that a woman should have seven and only a fool eight - Mishcon was not a man given to small talk, nor one who would tolerate prattle for the sake of it.
  • (3) Comparisons between present-day China and the soulless, dreary totalitarian socialist state immortalised in Orwell's masterpiece are difficult to sustain after seeing clutch after clutch of Chinese teenagers, dressed in the latest quasi-Japanophile fashion, walk down a mobbed Beijing pedestrian shopping arcade nibbling at bouquets of candy floss and prattling on as if the phrase "commodity fetishism" had never crossed their young lips.
  • (4) The opening prattle this week is all about the seven deadly sins.
  • (5) I think they're about to escort me from the building for prattling on in an unGuardian manner.
  • (6) Melancholia itself would have been talking point enough without Von Trier's prattling.
  • (7) These days depression is the stuff of postprandial dinner-party prattle, but Plath explored the condition with no sense of its being a "condition" that others shared, no established therapeutic vocabulary, and no Prozac.
  • (8) The South Americans have played 25 games, and are guaranteed to play two more including tomorrow's match • Three of Diego Forlán's four goals in World Cup finals history have come from outside the box 7:10pm: As ITV's panel prattling on about how surprising it is to see harmony in the Dutch camp - exagerrating the divisions of the past and reinforcing the view that English society remains stubbornly anti-intellectual (and anti-male knitting), afraid of anyone who does not fear to speak his mind - let's see what's happening in Uruguay.
  • (9) Anyway, I won't prattle on for there is more live action to be found: San Jose Earthquakes vs LA Galaxy is about to kick off.
  • (10) Or it could be that the Sun loves me when I'm a prattling, giggling, Essex boy "Shagger of the Year", when I'm in my proper place, beneath vacuous headlines, herding their flock towards dumb lingo and crap bingo, when I'm being cheeky on MTV or even unwisely invading answerphones, in a way that many would argue, is less offensive than the manner that they are alleged to have done.
  • (11) Inexperienced MPs who prattle on about deeper UK involvement in Syria don’t yet grasp how merely symbolic much of it is nowadays.
  • (12) When I hear him prattle on inanely I can imagine how Neil Lennon felt when the Geordie dullard kicked him in the head."
  • (13) 2.30pm BST If you'd like to see me, Ian Prior, Barry Glendenning and Owen Gibson prattling on in front of a camera about Sir Alex Ferguson's retirement, then you're in luck!
  • (14) The forced cheerfulness of Nicholson's earlier scenes with the hotel manager are a sharp contrast to the sense of anger and tension as he drives and listens to his wife and son prattle on.