(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.
Quirk
Definition:
(n.) A sudden turn; a starting from the point or line; hence, an artful evasion or subterfuge; a shift; a quibble; as, the quirks of a pettifogger.
(n.) A fit or turn; a short paroxysm; a caprice.
(n.) A smart retort; a quibble; a shallow conceit.
(n.) An irregular air; as, light quirks of music.
(n.) A piece of ground taken out of any regular ground plot or floor, so as to make a court, yard, etc.; -- sometimes written quink.
(n.) A small channel, deeply recessed in proportion to its width, used to insulate and give relief to a convex rounded molding.
Example Sentences:
(1) There is religious freedom in Britain – some would say too much: 26 bishops sit in the House of Lords on a historic quirk.
(2) A quirk of the General Chiropractic Council's rules means that chiropractors who make claims that are incompatible with previous Advertising Standards Authority rulings must be investigated by the regulator.
(3) From time to time I'd bump into Amy she had good banter so we could chat a bit and have a laugh, she was a character but that world was riddled with half-cut, doped-up chancers, I was one of them, even in early recovery I was kept afloat only by clinging to the bodies of strangers so Winehouse, but for her gentle quirks didn't especially register.
(4) The 8,000 –2,000 children and young people over the course of a year and 6,000 older and disabled adults – are users of social care services in Quirk’s borough of Lewisham.
(5) But if Microsoft can iron out some performance quirks around voice recognition and Snap, the decision won't be too hard: it's far easier to glimpse the future potential in the Xbox One, starting with 10 seconds of time and the simple two-word voice command: 'Xbox on.'"
(6) Any quirk in the way a small number of people on our schemes are counted makes little difference.
(7) It could be that grouping makes sense, especially when you think of how very specialist some services are becoming, such as commissioning for dementia care,” says Quirk.
(8) But vampires and zombies are old news, according to Quirk.
(9) Fake or misleading news spreads like wildfire on Facebook because of confirmation bias, a quirk in human psychology that makes us more likely to accept information that conforms to our existing world views.
(10) A detail-rich paint job and enough sounds and quirks are able to convince you, with a touch of the suspension of disbelief, that he is more than just an expensive chunk of plastic.
(11) All are taking on the expansive driving genre introduced by Test Drive Unlimited and reworking it for next-gen hardware, but right now it's difficult to tease out the individual quirks amid all that brushed aluminium and lasciviously winking lens flare.
(12) As she remembers her years at a kind of country boarding school called Hailsham, the quirks of her narration nudge the reader to guess at what she is not telling us.
(13) Brin, who is more sociable than Page, has his own quirks.
(14) Thanks to the labyrinthine quirks of our electoral system, none of this may get in the way of a "win" in 2015.
(15) Comedy While the French were being amused by the subtle quirks of Tati's Monsieur Hulot, the English were clutching their sides at large-breasted women losing their bikinis, and men saying "phwoooar" or "oooh" a lot.
(16) A UK remake is reportedly on the way, which in my opinion is redundant, although it does boast a fine cast including Pauline Quirke and John Challis.
(17) There was also a $5m lawsuit (from Trump, of all quirks, as opposed to the orangutan species).
(18) And this, by a happy quirk of fate, is also Emmanuelle Riva's 86th birthday.
(19) Pancreatic enzyme products are formulated, manufactured, and sold without submitting efficacy or bioavailability data to the Food and Drug Administration because of a quirk in the law.
(20) Economists often concern themselves with distortions created by quirks in the tax code or barriers to trade, but the losses from having an economy operate below full employment dwarf these inefficiencies.