(n.) A moral weakness; a failing; a weak point; a frailty.
(n.) The half of a sword blade or foil blade nearest the point; -- opposed to forte.
Example Sentences:
(1) Many of the patients anthropomorphise the seal, enjoy pretending that it is a real, living creature, with all the associated foibles.
(2) This week's edition of the FT's How to Spend It, suggests some Christmas foibles – £625 gloves, £705 Black Amber perfume, a £10,000 Boodles bangle.
(3) We're given a vivid description, details and foibles, before the town is populated with a cast of characters to rival any soap opera.
(4) If the mot juste was always a priority – "I suppose we all have our foibles.
(5) The sharp-witted late-night TV star, who regularly skewers the foibles of other celebrities, found himself on the end of the same treatment after being at the centre of a bizarre blackmail plot over the sexual affairs he had with younger female staff members.
(6) Children and their services have been prey to causes célèbres, fashion and the exaggerated fads and foibles of the media and politicians; they have thrived best when society and their carers were tolerant, and loving, sought good qualities to augment, not evil to exorcise, and succeeded in balancing structure and control with flexibility and freedom to grow.
(7) While cables exposing the foibles of Pakistan's civilian leaders triggered a media feeding frenzy, the press largely ignored revelations that cast the powerful military in a bad light, including its alleged support for Islamist extremist groups such as the Taliban.
(8) This is not about the exposure of one man's alleged foibles.
(9) We tend not to pin that badge on Ukip because of a paradoxical foible of Britishness that makes imagined immunity from aggressive identity politics a point of national pride.
(10) I'm afraid I didn't enjoy either Django Unchained or Inglourious Basterds – they were too self-reverential for my taste – but, as a writer, nobody in the world has a better ear for the foibles and vulnerabilities of his bad guys than Tarantino.
(11) Gray was as funny and vicious about his own haplessness as he was about the foibles of others.
(12) WS: That Bafta routine of yours in the show was the crux for me – a perfect exemplar of your character’s foibles, because the ambiguity is absolute: Does he care about not winning one or not?
(13) By contrast, this collection – which will be available online immediately and in shops in July – celebrated British foibles and eccentricities, in the animal-motif knitwear and eclectic mix of town and country fabrics.
(14) The well done steak is not simply a personal foible, like preferring pepperoni pizza to a margarita.
(15) And, for all his foibles, Mad-Eye Moody from Harry Potter is a man you'd follow, too.
(16) This essay on the last years of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's life exhibits all of Sebald's strengths as a writer – and all of his strange, gnomic, secretive foibles.
(17) For example, I've never heard him acknowledge that, in joking about Georgina Sachs's sexual foibles and menstrual cycle , he was demeaning to her.
(18) Over the years, scrutiny of Westminster has gradually come to rest on personal foibles, grudges and coups both real and imaginary - a kind of higher office-politics.
(19) The emphasis was always on the comedy, the foibles and peccadilloes of the characters, a gentle cynicism about the ways of the world, a joy in puns, a love of irritating footnotes, a relish for the bathetic puncturing of the bombastic – and above all an irrepressible and infectious silliness.
(20) None of us is free of foibles and peculiarities that the patient notices sooner or later.
Idiosyncrasy
Definition:
(n.) A peculiarity of physical or mental constitution or temperament; a characteristic belonging to, and distinguishing, an individual; characteristic susceptibility; idiocrasy; eccentricity.
Example Sentences:
(1) Since 1887, winter green is claimed to have caused dermatitis and to have been responsible for "idiosyncrasy".
(2) Until now it has not been possible to define the enzymatic abnormality which could explain this metabolic type of idiosyncrasy.
(3) Factors limiting the interpretability and generalizability of these findings are discussed with particular reference to sample size and idiosyncrasies.
(4) The mechanisms involve toxicity, idiosyncrasy, allergy, or a combination.
(5) Cincophen induces hepatic necrosis through a hypersensitivity or metabolic idiosyncrasy mechanism with histologic abnormalities similar to those due to isoniazid, anticonvulsants, halothane and methyldopa.
(6) There was distinct host idiosyncrasy in the pattern of estimated counts of these five types.
(7) This method involves building a face with clay or other suitable material on to a skull or its cast, taking into account appropriate facial thickness measurements together with information provided by anthropologists such as approximate age, sex, race and other individual idiosyncrasies.
(8) To test whether this diversity was a geographic idiosyncrasy, we analyzed 25 cervical biopsy specimens from Brazil.
(9) This is further complicated by the added impact of pharmacokinetic idiosyncrasies displayed by children, coupled with the routine pitfalls of therapeutic drug monitoring seen in any patient population.
(10) In particular, caries diagnosis and restorative treatment planning are subject to considerable idiosyncrasies.
(11) In order to identify generalities and detect idiosyncrasies, analyses were carried out using RNase P RNAs from three phylogenetically diverse organisms: Bacillus subtilis, Chromatium vinosum and Escherichia coli.
(12) Review: Amazon’s Fire Phone offers new gimmicks, old platform growing pains - Ars Technica Past tablet success isn't enough to guarantee a win for Amazon in the high-end smartphone game for Andrew Cunningham for Ars Technica: The problem is that even if all of your media lives in Amazon's cloud, phones running iOS or Google-approved Android can access all of it without the third-party app gap or FireOS' idiosyncrasies (the exception is Instant Video on Android, though rumour has it that Amazon will be releasing that app soon).
(13) It is curious that no antiarrhythmic drug seems to be statistically less exposed to this type of complication which may result from phenomena of toxicity or idiosyncrasy.
(14) I write a personal blog and it often features my sons: their weird enthusiasms, their idiosyncrasies, their repeated requests that I look at a picture of a man selling advertising space on his neck goitre in the Ripley's Believe it or Not!
(15) South Africa’s idiosyncrasies, from party politics to the high crime rate, provided regular material.
(16) His descriptions – of battlefields or mushroom-picking or meals – are full of exactly the right amount of idiosyncrasy and detail.
(17) However, since the hepatotoxicity appears to involve an element of idiosyncrasy, the primary defect in some cases may be an inherited or acquired deficiency in the drug's beta-oxidation.
(18) Since inhibition of cyclo-oxygenase precipitates asthmatic attacks in patients with aspirin idiosyncrasy, we have evaluated the effects of pharmacological inhibition of the next enzyme in arachidonic acid cascade, i.e., thromboxane synthetase.
(19) Lithium discontinuation produced a significant increase in associational productivity and a demonstrable increase in associative idiosyncrasy, and restoration of lithium dose significantly reversed both effects.
(20) The variability among qualitative judgments of odors which makes it difficult to construct reliable classifications may depend on cultural or personal idiosyncrasies.