What's the difference between gaudy and meretricious?

Gaudy


Definition:

  • (superl.) Ostentatiously fine; showy; gay, but tawdry or meretricious.
  • (superl.) Gay; merry; festal.
  • (n.) One of the large beads in the rosary at which the paternoster is recited.
  • (n.) A feast or festival; -- called also gaud-day and gaudy day.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The outcome is a belief that the Earth is being slowly strangled by a gaudy coat of impermeable plastic waste that collects in great floating islands in the world's oceans; clogs up canals and rivers; and is swallowed by animals, birds and sea creatures.
  • (2) Gaudy, Elizabeth T. (University of Illinois, Urbana), and R. S. Wolfe.
  • (3) Feeling peckish, I ride to the lake’s official and slightly gaudy Strandbad, which is free to get in and has several snack stalls.
  • (4) We have seen upsets and outbursts, sunshine and downpours, staggering exits and gaudy new arrivals.
  • (5) In the swimming pool below us, a throng of bikini-clad women and lads in Quiksilver board shorts are drinking gaudy cocktails and splashing about, having piggy-back pool fights.
  • (6) The march was later stopped a block away from Trump’s gaudy Fifth Avenue skyscraper where earlier in the day protester Margot Borske, 61, a nurse practitioner, told the Guardian: “We can continue to make our protest heard for every piece of legislation, every cabinet appointment, every amendment he tries to overturn [to] set this country back 50 years.
  • (7) Nestled away on an anonymous street behind Victoria station in London, opposite a Ladbrokes betting shop and overshadowed by the gaudy branding of a nearby restaurant called Loco Mexicano, is a little glass door crowned with the words Pret Academy.
  • (8) Gezi Park was completely cleared of the gaudy paraphernalia of pluralist protest that had been its hallmark.
  • (9) So he positively enjoyed draping what is, in fact, a chilling allegory of paternal possessiveness and pseudo-scientific fanaticism, in the gaudy fabric of a "romance", just as the author pretends, in his pseudo-preface, to have discovered it among the works of "M de l'Aubépine" (French for "haw-thorn").
  • (10) I smoked it on the plane all the way back to London, hiding the gaudy light show under a blanket.
  • (11) They gave the orders, booked flights and accommodation, picked up the heroin, even bought loose, gaudy tourist shirts to cover up the drugs.
  • (12) In the middle of Amsterdam, the activists painted a small number of used bikes white, and issued a pamphlet stating that “the white bike symbolises simplicity and hygiene as opposed to the gaudiness and filth of the authoritarian car”.
  • (13) And who can forget a few years back when the bright, gaudy, rhinestoned nail designs popular with minorities made the jump from chavvy to chic as soon as the masses cottoned on?
  • (14) While shaking NBA commissioner Adam Silver's hand, Wiggins flashed a grin so wide that it almost – almost – deflected attention away from his gaudy, florally-patterned suit.
  • (15) So I’ve always dismissed cruising – with its gaudy decor and ra-ra entertainment – as tacky and unimaginative at best, socially shameful and environmentally reprehensible at worst.
  • (16) The spectre of Blair has been hanging over proceedings like forgotten Christmas decorations after Twelfth Night, a gaudy reminder of times past, once enjoyable but now dragging on.
  • (17) But my father is very far from being a hero – I always say if someone reads my book and wants to be Pablo Escobar, then I did a bad job.” And while Narcos does have a certain Goodfellas -style glamour to its depiction of Escobar’s gaudy world, it is careful to present a fully rounded portrayal of the drugs trade.
  • (18) Shoppers might well look upon it as Catholics do Gaudi's Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, a design that adds fantasia to the architectural experience of their religion.
  • (19) But the reality is that, like the gaudy birds in the aviary on the shores of the Zugersee, he is unable to flutter very far.
  • (20) Yet Douglas points out that real stardom came relatively late, when he was nudging middle age, with the gaudy double-header of Fatal Attraction and Wall Street.

Meretricious


Definition:

  • (a.) Of or pertaining to prostitutes; having to do with harlots; lustful; as, meretricious traffic.
  • (a.) Resembling the arts of a harlot; alluring by false show; gaudily and deceitfully ornamental; tawdry; as, meretricious dress or ornaments.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) It was the hangover of a meretricious general election.
  • (2) Hugh Trevor-Roper denounced it as this "meretricious, misleading work".
  • (3) To pretend otherwise is self-indulgent and meretricious.
  • (4) The campaign against next week's election of police commissioners is meretricious.
  • (5) "There is now a disproportionate amount of meretricious material aimed at appealing to public prurience, most of which revolves around the philandering of celebrities," he argues.
  • (6) Of course, even thinking in these crude competitive "scoresheet" terms is a very un-Serious thing to be doing, and the admirers of 12 Years a Slave may have a sinking feeling that it will not be properly rewarded in the tinselly, meretricious, un-Serious Oscar world.
  • (7) There is now a disproportionate amount of meretricious material aimed at appealing to public prurience, most of which revolves around the philandering of celebrities.
  • (8) Almost like the protagonist of a Victorian novel, Sharif was overtaken by his own success, to the extent that in order to service the debts incurred by gambling and a playboy lifestyle, he was thrown back on accepting any work that came his way, and entered a downward spiral into trivial and meretricious movies.
  • (9) Churchill's grandson, the Conservative MP Winston Churchill , wrote to Armstong worried that "my grandfather's wartime diary appears to have fallen into the hands of this meretricious historian, David Irving."
  • (10) Novels that sparkled in the summer sun will seem flashy and meretricious in the sober light of autumn.