(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.
Madness
Definition:
(a.) The condition of being mad; insanity; lunacy.
(a.) Frenzy; ungovernable rage; extreme folly.
Example Sentences:
(1) Do [MPs] remember the madness of those advertisements that talked of the cool fresh mountain air of menthol cigarettes?
(2) Right from the beginning, I had been mad about movies.
(3) "This will be not only be a postcode lottery, but a States vs Europe lottery and that would be madness."
(4) It took years of prep work to make this sort of Übermensch thing socially acceptable, let alone hot – lots of “legalize it!” and “you are economic supermen!” appeals to the balled-and-entitled toddler-fists of the sociopathic libertechian madding crowd to really get mechanized mass-death neo-fascism taken mainstream .
(5) Or perhaps the "mad cow"-fuelled beef war in the late 1990s, when France maintained its ban on British beef for three long years after the rest of the EU had lifted it, prompting the Sun to publish a special edition in French portraying then president Jacques Chirac as a worm.
(6) • +33 2 98 50 10 12, hotel-les-sables-blancs.com , doubles from €105 room only Hôtel Ty Mad, Douarnenez Hôtel Ty Mad In the 1920s the little beach and fishing village of Douarnenez was a favourite haunt of the likes of Pablo Picasso and writer and artist Max Jacob.
(7) If you’re against the RFS, you’re going to make Iowans mad, you’re going to [have] some Iowans question you but the beauty of Iowa is you can take your case to the people,” said Kaufmann.
(8) In its more loose, common usage, it's a game in which the rivalry has come to acquire the mad, rancorous intensity of a Celtic-Rangers, a Real Madrid-Barcelona, an Arsenal-Tottenham, a River Plate-Boca Juniors.
(9) Yes, we can assign more or less responsibility – I blame Austria-Hungary and Germany for their mad determination to destroy Serbia knowing that a general war might result – but there is still plenty of room for disagreement.
(10) It’s good to hear a full-throated defence of social security as a basic principle of civilisation, and a reiteration of the madness of renewing Trident; pleasing too to behold how much Burnham and Cooper have had to belatedly frame their arguments in terms of fundamental principle.
(11) The blue skipping rope – that’s the key to this race.” My eight-year-old daughter looked at me like I was mad … but when it came time for the year 3 skipping race, she did as she was told – and duly chalked up a glorious personal best in third place.
(12) The policies of zero tolerance equip local and federal law-enforcement with increasingly autocratic powers of coercion and surveillance (the right to invade anybody's privacy, bend the rules of evidence, search barns, stop motorists, inspect bank records, tap phones) and spread the stain of moral pestilence to ever larger numbers of people assumed to be infected with reefer madness – anarchists and cheap Chinese labour at the turn of the 20th century, known homosexuals and suspected communists in the 1920s, hippies and anti-Vietnam war protesters in the 1960s, nowadays young black men sentenced to long-term imprisonment for possession of a few grams of short-term disembodiment.
(13) Maleic acid dimethylester (MAD) was investigated in acute and subacute dermal toxicity studies, for sensitization potential, and for in vivo and in vitro genotoxicity.
(14) Or maybe it's the other way round - the constant touring is a manifestation of their madness.
(15) And while one may think that the bishops of the Church of England don’t quite have the sex appeal of Russell Brand, we think that we should counter it.” While the bishops stress that their letter is not intended as “a shopping list of policies we would like to see”, they do advocate a number of specific steps, including a re-examination of the need for Trident, a retention of the commitment to funding overseas aid and a reassessment of areas where regulations fuel “the common perception of ‘health and safety gone mad’”.
(16) He still thinks Labour was mad to get him of all people to work inside the system.
(17) That has changed over the past few years as wallpaper has made a comeback and women have remembered that they like wearing madly patterned dresses – particularly leopard-print ones, or ones with huge flowers.
(18) Seeing the performance later in Edinburgh, I was impressed by Briers' ability to encompass the hero's rage and madness.
(19) It would be hard to allow working from home if I thought that they were all watching box sets of Mad Men.
(20) People thought she'd gone mad, but in retrospect it's clear that this was precisely what she needed in order to move forward.