What's the difference between expletive and obscene?

Expletive


Definition:

  • (a.) Filling up; hence, added merely for the purpose of filling up; superfluous.
  • (n.) A word, letter, or syllable not necessary to the sense, but inserted to fill a vacancy; an oath.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) A few years back, a survey of 3,000 11-year-olds revealed that nine out of 10 parents swear in front of their children, and the average kid heard six different expletives per week (whoever said profanity was bad for your vocabulary?).
  • (2) Tories warned last night of a plot to destabilise one of David Cameron's most trusted advisers, after details of an expletive-fuelled row with train staff which led to an £80 fine for Steve Hilton, the strategy director, were leaked to Channel 4 News.
  • (3) This from the Wall Street Journal : As they lined up for a team photo at Incheon, Seoul’s main international airport, the players were showered with “yeot,” a traditional candy that is also a common synonym for a Korean expletive.
  • (4) But you saw the spirit in the team tonight, we kept fighting to the end.” For Leicester it was another chastening evening and one that ended with Nigel Pearson embroiled in an ugly row, in which expletives were exchanged, with a fan.
  • (5) On Thursday the FA disclosed the full extent of Ince's actions as it revealed he physically assaulted the fourth official Mark Pottage while using a series of expletives.
  • (6) The players have said to me: ‘We don’t want any Bertie Big,’” Walsh said, leaving out the expletive.
  • (7) One person told Starmer the decision not to prosecute was a "fucking disgrace", sources said, and other expletives were used.
  • (8) F1: Max Verstappen calls Toro Rosso strategy a ‘joke’ in expletive-laden tirade Read more “The team is in good shape, we know we can up our game and put pressure on these guys.
  • (9) One of Rajaratnam's co-accused, fund manager Danielle Chiesi, tells the government's informant on one call that "you put me in jail if you talk", adding that she will be like "Martha [expletive] Stewart".
  • (10) Meanwhile in the American League... Steve Busfield (@Busfield) Benches clear in Detroit as Martinez and Balfour fling expletives but no punches thrown.
  • (11) It was clear that McGregor’s barbs were getting at Diaz, who grew increasingly flustered and struggled to muster replies that went beyond a barrage of expletives.
  • (12) And there will still be a mixture of homegrown material and features glommed from Wired's American edition, alongside an eclectic slate of contributors that includes the distinguished (Oxford neuroscientist Susan Greenfield) and the rabble-rousing (Warren Ellis, the expletive-addicted comic book writer).
  • (13) Whereas an American, for example, has a little blow-hole on the top of their head from which they can release their irritation in an expletive-laced explosion, a Briton has no such release.
  • (14) Players that he knows to express one view in private, usually strident and expletive-laden, switch to bland when the camera rolls.
  • (15) A former UK cabinet minister has said he regrets losing his temper, after being recorded launching an expletive-ridden tirade at a London taxi driver following a visit to Buckingham Palace with his partner, who had just been awarded a CBE.
  • (16) Jeremy Corbyn’s Twitter account appeared to have been hijacked on Sunday night when a series of expletive-laden tweets were posted.
  • (17) The London mayor, Boris Johnson, has marked the last week of election campaigning with an expletive-laden tirade, accusing a senior BBC journalist of talking "fucking bollocks" on a lunchtime TV bulletin.
  • (18) Meryl Streep won for dramatic actress as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, her eighth win at the Globes – and surpised the audience with a string of expletives in her acceptance speech when she fumbled for her spectacles.
  • (19) Sometimes, his movement was not sharp enough and the expletives flowed in his direction and on other occasions, his touch or decision-making was not up to scratch.
  • (20) Instead, Cissé was left unattended to glance into the corner and you could almost hear the offers coming in for McClaren, who had given his players an expletive-filled rebuke after last week’s insipid defeat to Leicester , to pen a study on man-management.

Obscene


Definition:

  • (a/) Offensive to chastity or modesty; expressing of presenting to the mind or view something which delicacy, purity, and decency forbid to be exposed; impure; as, obscene language; obscene pictures.
  • (a/) Foul; fifthy; disgusting.
  • (a/) Inauspicious; ill-omened.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) These letters are also written during a period when Joyce was still smarting from the publishing difficulties of his earlier works Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” Gordon Bowker, Joyce’s biographer, agreed: “Joyce’s problem with the UK printers related to the fact that here in those days printers were as much at risk of prosecution on charges of publishing obscenities as were publishers, and would simply refuse to print them.
  • (2) The footballer, who plays for club side Gabala and the national team , had waved a Turkish flag during a Europa League match in Cyprus, and appeared to make an obscene gesture at a Greek journalist who asked why he had done so.
  • (3) A catalogue of errors allowed the broadcast on Radio 2 of a series of obscene messages the pair had left on the actor Andrew Sachs's answerphone.
  • (4) Randall, a former banking computer analyst and a widower with two grownup daughters, learned on Wednesday that charges of "trafficking obscene material" had been dropped and he was to be deported.
  • (5) Zimmerman was charged with an offence of sending by public communication network an offensive, indecent, obscene, menacing message or matter.
  • (6) The Occupy protesters outside St Paul's Cathedral in London named their camp "Tahrir Square" while they sat cross-legged, sang songs and consumed Marks & Spencer sandwiches, oblivious to the obscenity of a comparison with freedom fighters who risked their lives in Egypt.
  • (7) And while Altmejd presents sexual scenes of cartoonish horror and disgust, Lucas's art has embraced lavatorial humour, abjection, self-denigration, the pithy sculptural one-liner and the obscene gesture.
  • (8) Reuters's source said police told Ai: "You criticised the government, so we are going to let all society know that you're an obscene person, you evaded taxes, you have two wives, we want to shame you.
  • (9) Ing concedes she is hardly a fan of a man she accuses of a "blatant and obscene lack of ethics", but rejects the accusation that the film is anti-Thaksin propaganda: her use of red, for instance, was decided long before it became associated with his redshirts .
  • (10) The guidelines say that prosecutions should not be brought under obscenity laws but on the basis of the menace and humiliation intended, and in the most serious cases, where intimate images are used to coerce victims into further sexual activity, under the Sexual Offences Act 2003.
  • (11) Several other places were vetoed on account of various scandals and disputes, and I have also excluded luxurious and obscenely priced retreats.
  • (12) One Barking and Dagenham resident – a British citizen with Indian Caribbean heritage – described the BNP leaflet campaign as "obscene".
  • (13) Yet our confusions over the c-word are demonstrated by the fact that it has been common in recent years to find hundreds of women standing in a public arena and yelling the gynaecological obscenity: the setting is performances of the drama The Vagina Monologues, in which one sequence invites women to reclaim and empower the down-there noun.
  • (14) He was prosecuted under section 127(1) of the Communications Act 2003, which prohibits sending "by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character".
  • (15) The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has buried that obscene version of history by convicting Bagosora of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes – and, in the process, establishing that what happened in Rwanda in 1994 was neither accidental nor spontaneous.
  • (16) He included the text of an email sent to the National Gallery of Victoria’s curatorial team on 12 September saying any work using the pieces could not “contain any political, religious, racist, obscene or defaming statements”.
  • (17) Can you still read and do the things you want?’ And he said that since he’d had his child, he had more time because it made him stronger, more concentrated, more serious.’” We discuss how the word “feminism” was considered an obscenity during their trial.
  • (18) Club leaders, who argue that a wife should serve as a "good sex worker" and a "whore" to her husband, showed the book to journalists last month in an effort to dispel what they called misconceptions that it was obscene and demeaning to women.
  • (19) The district judge Elizabeth Roscoe found Nunn guilty of sending indecent, obscene or menacing messages following a trial at City of London magistrates court this month, and jailed him on Monday.
  • (20) • Outrages by Naomi Wolf Naomi Wolf follows Vagina with an examination of the 1857 Obscene Publications Act – the first law to ban the sale of obscene materials.