(n.) The state of being foolish; want of good sense; levity, weakness, or derangement of mind.
(n.) A foolish act; an inconsiderate or thoughtless procedure; weak or light-minded conduct; foolery.
(n.) Scandalous crime; sin; specifically, as applied to a woman, wantonness.
(n.) The result of a foolish action or enterprise.
Example Sentences:
(1) It is a folly to think measures to fix eurozone governance will suffice, however needed those may be.
(2) A senior Conservative cabinet minister has issued a warning to leaders "of all political parties" that putting Britain's membership of the European Union at risk would be "complete folly" and that the "irresponsible" debate taking place is damaging the country's influence at the negotiating table.
(3) Whenever I hear about David Blunkett's tests for new immigrants, I think of my mother's initial impressions and don't know whether to laugh or cry: laugh because of the patent folly of his attempts to fix what is fluid and to codify what is contested in British identity; or cry at the racism that has inspired it, the nationalism that informs it, and the historical, political and cultural illiteracy that infects every part of it.
(4) Vice, folly and humbug – it is the point of satire really.
(5) Honor & Folly ( honorandfolly.com , one bedroom $165 a night, both bedrooms $215, plus a sofabed for children) is a home away from home with a fully stocked kitchen and a cosy living area decorated with vintage and locally crafted furniture.
(6) His friend Dingle Foot drafted an editorial that David then sharpened up, inserting phrases that summed up his outlook: 'We had not realised that our government was capable of such folly and crookedness...It is no longer possible to bomb countries because you fear that your trading interests will be harmed...this new feeling for the sanctity of human life is the best element in the modern world.'
(7) ‘Patriotism’ is a difficult concept to pin, and one man’s patriotism can easily be misjudged as folly or even treachery if we start judging based on a narrow understanding of the term.” Walid, a Muslim veteran of the navy, added that “even though we invaded Iraq based upon bogus information, that doesn’t diminish the sacrifice of Captain Khan and other American service members who lost their lives”.
(8) A few years before Lady Thatcher and Mr Letwin became obsessed with the poll tax, the American historian Barbara Tuchman wrote a book about the march of folly in human affairs from the Trojan to the Vietnamese war.
(9) To continue along this path of folly is not compatible with the maintenance of wealth, nor with the health of humans or the biosphere.
(10) At 568,969, the paper’s circulation had recently overtaken that of its old rival, the Sunday Times : it’s not true that it plummeted after Suez as a result of the outrage caused by Astor adding the line: “We had not realised that our government was capable of such folly and such crookedness” to Dingle Foot’s leader – but well-heeled middle-class readers who cancelled their subscriptions were replaced by relatively impoverished students and leftwing intellectuals.
(11) Some startlingly grand privately owned buildings have repeatedly appeared on the annual register of the most important listed buildings at risk – virtually all the HHA properties are listed, and many are also scheduled ancient monuments or set in grade I gardens – including garden buildings and follies at Castle Howard in Yorkshire and Frogmore mausoleum, which holds some of the Queen's ancestors, in the grounds of Windsor Castle.
(12) In London, the Times newspaper called Ford’s position denying aid to New York City an “act of monumental folly”.
(13) Giles Swayne London • "Intelligent" Boris Johnson commits the age-old folly of mistaking good fortune, selfishness, narcissism and aggression for intelligence, but unwittingly demonstrates the wrongness of his position.
(14) That police can legally do this, the QCCL argues, illustrates the folly and unfairness of laws intended to safeguard an event at which police, on their own projections, will outnumber protesters three to one.
(15) This sad state of affairs shows the folly of handing over taxpayers’ money to unaccountable groups to run schools.
(16) There are obvious implications for public services, and the clear link between poor public services and demand for healthcare is ignored at our folly.
(17) In a household, it would be economic folly to lay out grand plans without having the money to pay for them.
(18) The cliff-side Mussenden Temple is a folly that was modelled on the Temple of Vesta in Rome and built for the Earl Bishop of Derry (one of Lord Bristol’s eccentric forbears), in 1785.
(19) Follies plays exquisitely on the unreliability of memory and the ephemerality of theatre; it is a stark warning against the distorting dangers of nostalgia.
(20) In giving $850bn to the IMF the G20 are only making the poor suffer more, and forcing them to pay for the folly and greed of bankers and speculators.
Imbecility
Definition:
(n.) The quality of being imbecile; weakness; feebleness, esp. of mind.
Example Sentences:
(1) Infantile delivery also frequently serves to take the curse off self-publicity; sleight of hand for those who find "my programme is on BBC2 tonight" too presumptuous and exposing, and prefer to cower behind the low-status imbecility of "I done rote a fingy for da tellybox!"
(2) By this shape of holidays the partical sphere of the process of training and education, namely the qualification of those oligophren ones in spending an ingenious leisure, should be noticed and contributed to educating those imbecile boys and girls, who are participating their holidays in a camp for their "relative independence*.
(3) Fifty-six patients with cerebral atherosclerosis and epileptiform symptomatology presented an organic defect with signs of lacunar imbecility and atherosclerotic asthenia.
(4) Report on a 5 year old girl with the caracteristic features of the partial trisomy of the short arm of a chromosome no.4: short stature, microcephaly, hydrocephaly, enophthalmus, bulbous nose, deep set malformed ears, hypertrichosis, brachydactyly, hypoplastic ribs, abnormal EEG, imbecility.
(5) "This is imbecilic," said Jean-Yves Oussedik, a historian, puffing his pipe outside the literary cafe Les Deux Magots.
(6) Target London , a folio of 18 posters, bleakly satirised the Thatcher government’s Protect and Survive nuclear attack directives; the critic Richard Cork described the series as the “most hard-hitting attack on government imbecility”.
(7) And there I was, week after week, paid a pittance to jeer at the Smith regime's imbecilities.
(8) It's time to address the public as competent grown-ups and not as imbeciles.
(9) As a late sequelae, there was one patient with intrahepatic block and portal hypertension and one with encephalopathy and imbecility.
(10) Treatment under general anesthesia is inevitably indicated in imbeciles, the feeble-minded, spastics, epileptics, and sometimes in mongoloids.
(11) But before he was a candidate, he was just a visible idiot, and Jon Stewart’s version of him as a knuckle-dragging Queens County imbecile has given us tremendous joy over the years.
(12) The disease had not been diagnosed during life despite imbecility since early childhood and the presence of guiding peripheral symptoms in the form of Pringle's disease.
(13) Meanwhile, because we no longer understand anything unless it is filtered through the prism of the Premier League, various newspapers have already dubbed May's poll " the Wags election " – a classification that underscores the almost infinite creativity of the British media, which have apparently now given up so emphatically that they are content to shoehorn absolutely all human experience into one of four or five pop-cultural tropes, the easier for the voters it apparently regards as imbeciles to understand.
(14) In broadcast interviews, ministers carefully dodge the delivery of any information at all; they would rather sound imbecilic, as if they understood very little and knew even less, than run the risk of having said anything of import.
(15) The differential-diagnostic criteria show the difference of the episodic psychoses of imbeciles from schizophrenias (grafted schizophrenias).
(16) The experience gathered thus far shows that the method presented by the author in his present paper enables the capacity and development of imbecile and abnormality feeble children and juveniles to be diagnosed.
(17) When some highly debile, or imbecile and idiotic children and adolescents refuse to cooperate during the stomatological attendance, the pedopsychiatric consultation fails.
(18) Yet social media is the last remaining British arena in which social mobility flourishes, where imbecilic irrelevances are fast-tracked to positions of extraordinary power by whichever MP or university professor or serious campaigner has decided to give their bile a platform on the news.
(19) Statistically significant differences were established in the values of integrative mark estimations of patients with pronounced debility, of those with mild, medium and profound imbecility.
(20) Patients with pronounced tetrapareses and contractures in all the joints, grave hyperkinesias in all the four extremities, and imbecility were classed with disability group I: those with pronounced para-, hemi-, and tetrapareses, extensive hyperkinesias, combination of the motor disorders with debility were placed into disability group II.