What's the difference between foolish and nonsense?

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”.

Nonsense


Definition:

  • (n.) That which is not sense, or has no sense; words, or language, which have no meaning, or which convey no intelligible ideas; absurdity.
  • (n.) Trifles; things of no importance.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Virtually every developed country has some form of property tax, so the idea that valuing residential property is uniquely difficult, or that it would be widely evaded, is nonsense.
  • (2) To this end, a meiosis-defective mating-type mutation was used as a marker for the plus segment, by taking advantage of its suppressibility by a nonsense suppressor.
  • (3) Real ear CVRs, calculated from real ear recordings of nonsense syllables, were obtained from eight hearing-impaired listeners.
  • (4) The first paper of this series (Picheny, Durlach, & Braida, 1985) presented evidence that there are substantial intelligibility differences for hearing-impaired listeners between nonsense sentences spoken in a conversational manner and spoken with the effort to produce clear speech.
  • (5) These data suggest that yeast tyrosyl-tRNA synthetase interacts with positions 34 and 35 of the anticodon of tRNATyr and opens the possibility that nonsense suppressor efficiency may be mediated by the level of aminoacylation.
  • (6) But this no-nonsense venue, just 10km but a world away from parliament, is the latest stop in a national pro-renewables tour that is making the Abbott government decidedly uncomfortable.
  • (7) Free recall of nonsense syllables was significantly better when these were learned under active compound.
  • (8) "It is clear this is a government which is short of ideas, desperately trying to bring up nonsensical diversions to distract attention from the situation in the country.
  • (9) Four regA mutants (regA1, regA8, regA11, and regA15) failed to make a protein having a molecular weight of about 12,000, whereas mutant regA9 did make such a protein; regA15 produced a new, apparently smaller protein that was presumably a nonsense fragment, whereas regA11 produced a new, apparently larger protein.
  • (10) In the first, span and free-recall measures were obtained for 24 subjects, each tested with four types of spoken material (nonsense syllables, random words, fourth-order approximations to English, and normal prose).
  • (11) I’d have been a TV celeb type, done these albums that are nonsense – and yeah, with hindsight, that wouldn’t have been a bad idea.
  • (12) In addition, purified protein of 62,000 daltons, resulting from the suppression of the nonsense mutations tox-30 and tox-45, will react with antisera purified against the terminal 17,000 daltons of the toxin molecule and are immunologically identical to toxin by radial immunodiffusion.
  • (13) The other three carry nonsense mutations which inactivate both the excision repair and essential functions.
  • (14) La Manga in Spain is an example of human nonsense: 20km of city length, two kilometres wide, with huge buildings all along,” said Couet.
  • (15) In a sign of Labour's need to avoid tension with business, Darling was careful to stress he was not criticising the signatories but said: "I wonder if one of their finance directors came to them and said 'look, we have this wonderful idea, and we are going to pay with it by savings we have not yet identified and by calculations we cannot verify', they would say 'that is complete nonsense'."
  • (16) The mutation, which is not of the common CG-to-TG type, is at the same codon in which both nonsense and a different missense (Arg to Gln) have previously been observed.
  • (17) Introduction of an ochre nonsense codon into the reading frame of the leader peptide sequence leads to considerable reduction of the basal expression and loss of inducibility of the cat gene.
  • (18) On the Iraq war, he admitted he had voted in favour of military action in 2003 though he said he thought at the time that Blair's claims about weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were "nonsense".
  • (19) Two nonsense mutations at codon positions 33 and 187 and an aberrant splice site were found in the human gene.
  • (20) The studies on the reverse mutation of osm3 indicated that this osmotic-sensitivity arises from a missense or nonsense mutation in OSM3 locus.

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