(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.
Virtue
Definition:
(n.) Manly strength or courage; bravery; daring; spirit; valor.
(n.) Active quality or power; capacity or power adequate to the production of a given effect; energy; strength; potency; efficacy; as, the virtue of a medicine.
(n.) Energy or influence operating without contact of the material or sensible substance.
(n.) Specifically, moral excellence; integrity of character; purity of soul; performance of duty.
(n.) A particular moral excellence; as, the virtue of temperance, of charity, etc.
(n.) Specifically: Chastity; purity; especially, the chastity of women; virginity.
(n.) One of the orders of the celestial hierarchy.
Example Sentences:
(1) Enough with Clintonism and its prideful air of professional-class virtue.
(2) Dermatoglyphic alterations in schizophrenic patients are considered in virtue of literature data and the author's own investigations.
(3) Since the enzyme requires a metal ion (Co2+) we suggest that the RNA and heparin are inhibitory by virtue of their capacity to chelate the Co2+.
(4) Given the liberalist context in which we live, this paper argues that an act-oriented ethics is inadequate and that only a virtue-oriented ethics enables us to recognize and resolve the new problems ahead of us in genetic manipulation.
(5) The results indicate that ACTH can alter pain sensitivity and that the effect of corticosteroids on the sensitivity to pain is an indirect one by virtue of their negative feed-back action on the hypothalamic-pituitary system.
(6) This test by virtue of its high sensitivity and the facilities in processing a large number of specimens, can prove to be useful in endemic areas for the recognition of asymptomatic malaria and screening of blood donors.
(7) The fitting element to a Cabrera victory would have been thus: the final round of the 77th Masters fell on the 90th birthday of Roberto De Vicenzo, the great Argentine golfer who missed out on an Augusta play-off by virtue of signing for the wrong score.
(8) The corresponding delta FeCO modes are identified at 574 and 566 cm-1, respectively, by virtue of the zigzag pattern of their isotopic shifts.
(9) All lesions but one were located extradurally, and patients with Stage D2 disease, by virtue of bony metastases, were therefore at greatest risk for development of neurologically compressive disease.
(10) By virtue of the technique, minimal incision surgery lends itself to a greater risk of causing epidermal inclusion cysts.
(11) Tumors of ceruminous gland origin appear to have a distinctive clinical behavior by virtue of their unique anatomical location in the external auditory canal.
(12) Proteases substituted with biotin were targeted via the cationic protein avidin A, which by virtue of its charge has affinity for the glomerular basement membrane.
(13) The study is based on 220 children from 91 families at high- and low-risk for major depression by virtue of the presence or absence of major depression in their parents.
(14) Our findings indicate that DFO has antileukemic properties by virtue of its effects on proliferation and differentiation, and they prompt further experimental and clinical studies with this agent.
(15) He will only be able to satisfy all the expectations if he masters, by virtue of his training and experience, the art of setting up a treatment plan with priorities.
(16) Although it is less selective than D-[3H]aspartate, DL-[3H]AP5 and [3H]NMDA, L-[3H]glutamate remains, by virtue of its high affinity, the ligand of choice for the study of NMDA receptors in preparations where such sites predominate.
(17) We postulated that the contraction by virtue of focal calcium release from the sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR) and was stimulated this process together with the processes of diffusion into the cytosol, binding to calmodulin and troponin, sequestration by the SR, and subsequent induction of Ca2+ release from the adjacent SR.
(18) Murdoch had one on his, of course, but because he was facing hostile interrogation he looked (unfairly) as if he were wearing it in self-protection as a symbol of his own virtue.
(19) Second, by virtue of their effects against rigor and spasticity, NMDA antagonists may reduce increased muscle tone and prevent rhabdomyolysis.
(20) Most critical are (a) how hardiness is to be measured; (b) whether hardiness should be treated as a unitary phenomenon or as three separate phenomena associated with commitment, control, and challenge; and (c) whether hardiness has direct effects on health or indirect effects by virtue of buffering the impact of stressful life events.