What's the difference between excuse and pretense?

Excuse


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To free from accusation, or the imputation of fault or blame; to clear from guilt; to release from a charge; to justify by extenuating a fault; to exculpate; to absolve; to acquit.
  • (v. t.) To pardon, as a fault; to forgive entirely, or to admit to be little censurable, and to overlook; as, we excuse irregular conduct, when extraordinary circumstances appear to justify it.
  • (v. t.) To regard with indulgence; to view leniently or to overlook; to pardon.
  • (v. t.) To free from an impending obligation or duty; hence, to disengage; to dispense with; to release by favor; also, to remit by favor; not to exact; as, to excuse a forfeiture.
  • (v. t.) To relieve of an imputation by apology or defense; to make apology for as not seriously evil; to ask pardon or indulgence for.
  • (v. t.) The act of excusing, apologizing, exculpating, pardoning, releasing, and the like; acquittal; release; absolution; justification; extenuation.
  • (v. t.) That which is offered as a reason for being excused; a plea offered in extenuation of a fault or irregular deportment; apology; as, an excuse for neglect of duty; excuses for delay of payment.
  • (v. t.) That which excuses; that which extenuates or justifies a fault.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) 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.'
  • (2) We need to stop making excuses for them: But it is up to the state to close the loopholes Yes, the state must work continually to tighten and simplify the tax regime, which is a deliberate mess keeping an entire industry of accounting firms and tax lawyers fed.
  • (3) "With hindsight," he writes, "it was a trumped-up excuse for radical activism for its own sake."
  • (4) The Frenchman has been excused from duty at Everton on Saturday on compassionate grounds and the club have put no time frame on his possible return.
  • (5) Becton’s lawyer, Hannah Stroud, told a separate news conference that stress was no excuse for Casebolt’s actions and “the manner in which Ms Becton was treated was excessive, inappropriate and without cause” and a civil rights violation.
  • (6) Well, Machado put those skills on display on Sunday, and this is an excuse to bring you his ridiculous play against the Yankees.
  • (7) This prompted an angry response from the bill's sponsors who accused opponents of using border security as an excuse to block any immigration reform.
  • (8) This lovely coastal route also gives you an excuse to hop on the Skye ferry, which plies its way over the narrows to Kylerhea from the start of this walk.
  • (9) I think the French manager told him ‘it’s very difficult to watch you when you’re not playing for PSG’ – he hasn’t got that excuse now.” Palace are also well worth watching.
  • (10) I'm not a believer, and my only problem with artistic licence is when the phrase is used as an excuse to oversimplify a work to improve its marketability.
  • (11) Nothing in this context can be soft-pedalled and excused.
  • (12) He continues: “And a ‘no excuses’ culture where excellence is the norm.” Police were called by a member of the public shortly after 11am after reports of a disturbance outside the school in George V Avenue, where a number of parents and pupils had gathered.
  • (13) The current IRS controversy does not excuse sham political organizations masquerading as social welfare organizations, and shines a light on the critical need for campaign spending disclosure legislation.
  • (14) David Winnick, the MP for Walsall North, said: "None of [May's] excuses can explain away the sheer incompetence and shambles that have occurred on her watch."
  • (15) Sessions are scheduled regularly throughout the year and take place outside the hospital; interns are excused from their service responsibilities for the duration of the meeting.
  • (16) "There is no excuse to cut back on services that patients depend on.
  • (17) His team had been working on a protest-themed game for the past two years, and the frenzy surrounding Occupy Central gave them an excuse to release a prototype.
  • (18) After years of on-and-off e-dating, in which I've met 150-200 women, fallen in love with one and invented extravagant excuses to extricate myself from awkward encounters with countless others, you might think I'd be tired of it all.
  • (19) "We are always followed by a crowd of people – not journalists, but people who are following us and track our every move, and look for any excuse to detain us."
  • (20) The bar on religious weddings was meant to reassure the faithful, but the Church of England has twisted the weird and novel distinction between religious and secular marriages into an excuse to oppose the whole reform , while it is left to Labour's Yvette Cooper to speak for liberal Jews and Quakers who resent the continuing bar on them offering ceremonial equality.

Pretense


Definition:

  • (n.) Alt. of Pretence

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Should Britain start behaving like the small island state it is rather than maintaining the pretensions of being a significant world player?
  • (2) The most important determinants of the behavior which connect the organism with its informational environment are pretensions to space, time, metabolism and changing of form.
  • (3) He is wary of pretension, alive to all shades of irony.
  • (4) The peculiar skill of HTB has been to preserve the confidence of the public-school officer class that it had a duty to lead, but to drop the surrounding pretensions, the idea being that what remains is professionalism and commitment.
  • (5) Preliminary results suggest that the effect produced by the distraction of ring pairs on interfragmentary micromotion is as significant as pretensioning of the wires.
  • (6) Using a strain gauged pretension device, a procedure for determining the natural state tension and extension fields in the skin has been developed.
  • (7) He was a poet of modest pretensions and, although his translation of Julius Caesar was not brilliant, he did, after all, dare to translate Shakespeare.
  • (8) The track, shamelessly mocking the pretensions of people who falsely associate themselves with the fashions and styles of the sprauncy Gangnam district of Seoul – a kind of South Korean Beverly Hills – has been called a "force for world peace" by the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon .
  • (9) Only one party with pretensions to government made the wrong choice; the Conservative Party of Britain.
  • (10) Leslie (1987b) proposed a new, metarepresentational model for the cognition of pretense.
  • (11) They were victims of a swatting attack, a malicious form of hoax where special weapons and tactics (Swat) teams are called to a victim’s home under false pretenses, with potentially deadly results.
  • (12) In fact, wet deposition has long been hailed as a possible solution by higher powers, with their lofty pretensions to control the elements.
  • (13) "I love the grunge, the lack of pretension and the simpler way of life," says the Manchester-born DJ and record producer, better known as A Guy Called Gerald, who helped to shape the acid house scene in the 1980s.
  • (14) Two explanations for this breakdown in the belief-desire reasoning subserving pretense are considered.
  • (15) To the extent they acknowledged any of this at all, their responses ranged from indulging patently absurd pretenses (this was just a polite request from the White House: what's wrong with that?)
  • (16) One need not be a supporter of China’s provocative and aggressive actions in the South China Sea to notice that the incident did not involve a Chinese nuclear-capable bomber in the Caribbean, or off the coast of California, where China has no pretensions of establishing a “Chinese lake”.
  • (17) This, too, is perpetual disaster capitalism, creating havoc and inflicting disaster upon individual souls for corporate greed without even needing the pretense of a crisis for an excuse.
  • (18) What I don’t like is the pretense and the assumption that someway or another Hackney needs to be grateful for all these up-and-coming industries.
  • (19) Clegg will insist that the Lib Dems have already replaced Labour as the country's leading "progressive" party and scoff at Tory pretensions to the same label.
  • (20) In the individual case with a provable causality of trauma on the acceleration of tumor progress a pretension for insurance es legal.