What's the difference between generosity and prodigality?

Generosity


Definition:

  • (n.) Noble birth.
  • (n.) The quality of being noble; noble-mindedness.
  • (n.) Liberality in giving; munificence.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The generosity of your readers ensures these young people have a greater chance of a positive future."
  • (2) During the last years of her life, Shearer wrote book reviews (not just of dance books) for the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, which were immensely readable though not celebrated for their generosity towards authors.
  • (3) The alleged killer could not imagine how the city of Charleston, under the good and wise leadership of Mayor Riley – how the state of South Carolina, how the United States of America would respond – not merely with revulsion at his evil act, but with big-hearted generosity and, more importantly, with a thoughtful introspection and self-examination that we so rarely see in public life.
  • (4) Reductions in the generosity of fee-for-service insurance lower the use of general medical and mental health services, but do they lead to lower mental health status for the covered population?
  • (5) The Centre for Policy Studies, a centre-right thinktank, said there was a huge difference between generosity, as practised by Warren Buffett, and compulsory taxation.
  • (6) The barrister, playwright and author Sir John Mortimer , who has died aged 85, was a man for all the seasons that touched his Chilterns garden, where he lived as profusely as he wrote, in a spirit of unjudgmental generosity.
  • (7) Everyone was taken aback by Harrison's generosity, not least Idle.
  • (8) They are thus funded or closed from season to season depending on the generosity of surrounding mines, the success of local art centres, and the sympathy of wealthy patrons.
  • (9) Give generosity to those who seek to form opinion and discernment to those who vote, that our nation may prosper and that with all the peoples of Europe we may work for peace and the common good; for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord.
  • (10) He said the UK legal aid system “is pretty much at the top of the tree in generosity” compared with the rest of Europe, but it was now necessary to get the multi-million pound budget under control.
  • (11) At least in the country we live in, there's an acceptance and a generosity and inclusiveness which has allowed us to accept alien cultures and learn from them.
  • (12) A dentist not so red in tooth and claw | Letters Read more WildCRU’s director, Prof David Macdonald, said the team would devote themselves to working for the conservation of lions following the “incredible generosity”.
  • (13) For instance, is it the greater generosity of the Swedish system--in Sweden, the share of drug reimbursement expenditures to total drug consumption is 57%, as against 33% in Norway, 38% in Finland and 34% in Denmark--that makes drug consumption per capita so much higher in Sweden?
  • (14) Above all, the way he responded to the brutality he had endured, his generosity towards his captors and his lack of desire for revenge against the wider white minority they had served established him as a kind of paragon.
  • (15) The Ned Waihopai River Sauvignon Blanc, Marlborough, New Zealand (£9.99, Waitrose ; Majestic ) There's all the pungent verdant grass-and-gooseberry of classic Kiwi sauvignon here to match with asparagus, plus the generosity of fruit and limey acidity that will work just as well with a mildly spicy and herby Vietnamese or Thai stir-fry.
  • (16) Their amazing generosity and hopefulness despite everything they’ve been through.
  • (17) If you don't turn up for work, you can be docked a day's pay – and whether you will or not largely depends on your boss's generosity.
  • (18) I’ve still got the blisters.” Still, that’s the virtue of a two-year campaign – during which Davis has been an unpaid, full-time candidate, who survives, as she puts it, on “debt and generosity.” It gives you time to try things.
  • (19) 4.15pm GMT There continues to be some controversy over the generosity of Plyushchenko’s scores.
  • (20) The development of higher education in Britain, and almost everywhere else, has been fundamentally driven by demands for the progressive enlargement of the educational “franchise”, responded to by the state initially with generosity but now with grudging resistance.

Prodigality


Definition:

  • (n.) Extravagance in expenditure, particularly of money; excessive liberality; profusion; waste; -- opposed to frugality, economy, and parsimony.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) So intense was the pre‑match excitement in Dortmund over the return of the prodigal Jürg – much of it media-led – that walking around this flat, functional city on the afternoon of the game you half expected to stumble across Klopp shrines, New Orleans-style Klopp jazz funerals, to look up and find his great beaming visage looming over the city like some vast alien saucer.
  • (2) Surely not just to accommodate Fabregas who is looking ever more an Arsenal reject than a prodigal son."
  • (3) Australia The role of Assange, the country's prodigal son, has generated the most coverage and debate.
  • (4) The album – 14 stoned insights into the mind of a prodigal 19-year-old submerged in bleak inner-city paranoia – may feel disobediently unbrilliant at times.
  • (5) The French poet Charles Baudelaire, prodigal son of the industrial revolution, is less careful with his time.
  • (6) Throughout the last stretch of the journey, in a minibus driving along winding roads through the misty Welsh landscape, I am in full prodigal-son mode, returning to the land of my fathers, or at least my mother's fathers.
  • (7) The results obtained indicated that only the mutant N189-10A, which have a defect in the pathway positioned next to the nucleotide precursor, guanosine triphosphate (GTP), produces prodigeous amounts of diacetyl and acetoin among the mutants and the wild strain used.
  • (8) Managerless Sunderland did an awful lot right but even their own, impressive, prodigal son, Lee Cattermole – starting his first Premier League match since February – could not prevent them coming undone on the break and they remain stuck firmly to the bottom of the table.
  • (9) He’d been Howard’s prodigal son, sometimes kissed and sometimes banished.
  • (10) Society wants a repentant sinner, but Arena's is a story about theatre and ideas, not some prodigal redemption.
  • (11) As any casual browser in the biography section of a bookshop will quickly realise, it is not enough these days for the writers of biographies to stand at one remove from their subjects; readers and publishers demand more of a connection – a lover, a prodigal son, an ex-wife.
  • (12) It's good for the league to snag a prodigal son, but Landon Donovan has been around for years.
  • (13) It will abolish guardianship by reason of mental disease, mental deficiency, prodigality, habitual drunkenness and drug addiction as well as guardianship of persons of full age and curatorship of infirm adults.
  • (14) Desperate to regain corporate members and shore up its ailing finances, Alec put together a list of companies it wished to woo back under the title “ the Prodigal Son Project ”.
  • (15) We should do for Greece what the Allies did for Germany, and say that she should not spend more than 3% of her export revenues on debt servicing, and that should be the deciding factor.” A survey of economists by Bloomberg last week found that more than half expect Greece to receive some debt relief after the election – notwithstanding the purported “moral hazard” of bailing out prodigal debtors.
  • (16) True, the Tottenham manager's "prodigal son" scored twice, Adebayor thereby boosting his goal tally to nine in 12 games, but Paulinho, Mousa Dembélé and Hugo Lloris all enjoyed splendid evenings too.
  • (17) This recurrent theme in her fictional writing is linked to events in her own family life, in particular her own assumption of a scapegoat-prodigal child role during the "African period" of her life.
  • (18) If it follows the prodigal habits of its parents, it would waste more energy in its lifetime than 20 Kenyans would carefully consume.
  • (19) He wants Kiev to return on its knees, like a prodigal son, to the fatherly embrace of the empire.
  • (20) In this dysfunctional family comedy, directed by Niegel Smith, a prodigal son returns home to find that his sister is now a brother and his formerly put-upon mother (the marvelously screwball Kristine Nielsen) is newly liberated and feeling less than wifely.