What's the difference between foolish and imbecilic?

Foolish


Definition:

  • (a.) Marked with, or exhibiting, folly; void of understanding; weak in intellect; without judgment or discretion; silly; unwise.
  • (a.) Such as a fool would do; proceeding from weakness of mind or silliness; exhibiting a want of judgment or discretion; as, a foolish act.
  • (a.) Absurd; ridiculous; despicable; contemptible.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) So, logic would dictate that if Greeks are genuinely in favour of reform – and opinion polls have consistently shown wide support for many of the structural changes needed – they would be foolish to give these two parties another chance.
  • (2) It would be foolish to bet that Saudi Arabia will exist in its current form a generation from now.” Memories of how the Saudis and Opec deliberately triggered an economic crisis in the west in retaliation for US aid to Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur war still rankle.
  • (3) That's foolish, because Real Madrid rarely look more uncomfortable than at set pieces.
  • (4) "We regret that Congress was forced to waste its time voting on a foolish bill that was premised entirely on false claims and ignorance," David Jenkins, an REP official, said in a statement.
  • (5) Shorten said while Hicks was “foolish to get caught up in the Afghanistan conflict” the court decision showed an injustice.
  • (6) Many commentators considered the suggestion merely foolish, but computer hackers issued death threats against her and her children, which she promptly posted on Twitter, along with the defiant message: "Get stuffed, losers.
  • (7) And it means that if Labour were to win, Mr Brown would be very foolish, indeed downright wrong, to move Mr Darling.
  • (8) "It was a certain kind of titillation the shop offered," the critic Matthew Collings has written, "sexual but also hopeless, destructive, foolish, funny, sad."
  • (9) Describing the moment McKellen knocked on his dressing room door he said: “I ushered him in nervously, expecting notes for my poor performance or indiscipline – I was a foolish, naughty young actor.
  • (10) But what people did when they were young and foolish, or even when they were not yet public figures, is not always the same.
  • (11) While we have this, it would be foolish to pursue a policy of still constraining resources in the acute sector.
  • (12) All three echoed remarks made recently by the Bank’s governor, Mark Carney, who said it would be “foolish” to cut rates in response to a temporary fall in inflation.
  • (13) Since the initially peaceful demonstrations against his regime began more than three years ago, he has proved himself, by turns, foolish, craven and vicious.
  • (14) In a high-risk, 65-minute speech in Manchester delivered without notes, and 20 minutes longer than he intended, Miliband tried to take the mantle of the 19th-century Tory prime minister Benjamin Disraeli's one nation, pointedly grabbing the territory and language of the centre ground which he believes David Cameron has foolishly vacated.
  • (15) But one backbencher, West Australian Liberal Dennis Jensen , has said it is foolish to set up a $20bn medical research fund at the same time as the government is cutting money from scientific agencies, including the CSIRO and the Australian Research Council.
  • (16) Donald Trump is too weak, too foolish and too chaotic to see beyond the immediate crises he has created.
  • (17) Here, too, Capote displayed uncanny journalistic skills, capturing even the most languid and enigmatic of subjects – Brando in his pomp – and eliciting the kinds of confidences that left the actor reflecting ruefully on his "unutterable foolishness".
  • (18) They privately acknowledge they were foolish in taking the bait, but argue they have broken no rules since they were offered no jobs, and therefore have no commercial interests to declare in the MPs' register.
  • (19) "Hopefully, the lesson is to stop this foolish childishness," McCain said Thursday on CNN.
  • (20) The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes.” As for the social conditions that obtain: “It is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to, and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish.” Looking back on my political activism of the 1970s and 80s, there was a lot of refusing to accept existing conditions on the basis that they were “wrong and foolish”.

Imbecilic


Definition:

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.

Words possibly related to "foolish"

Words possibly related to "imbecilic"