What's the difference between hoary and stale?

Hoary


Definition:

  • (a.) White or whitish.
  • (a.) White or gray with age; hoar; as, hoary hairs.
  • (a.) remote in time past; as, hoary antiquity.
  • (a.) Moldy; mossy; musty.
  • (a.) Of a pale silvery gray.
  • (a.) Covered with short, dense, grayish white hairs; canescent.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Seven species were represented among the specimens found to be rabid; there were 32 big brown bats, three hoary bats, three silver-haired bats, two little brown bats, one eastern pipistrelle, one Keen myotis and one red bat.
  • (2) One thing they will have to dispense with is the hoary old ritual of each party leader insisting that an unequivocal victory for him is both the essential outcome of an election and the only possible one.
  • (3) The prime minister's intervention today, in which he disinterred the hoary old chestnut of householders using "reasonable force" to defend their property, signals the beginning of a return of a more traditional Tory law and order agenda.
  • (4) We may like the fantasy of our food being produced by a chaotic patchwork of tiny farms run by women in dirndls and hoary old men with mutton chops – and a bit of that is good for the diversity of the culture – but when you crunch low-intensity yield against CO2 emissions, it’s not the most sustainable option.
  • (5) In the end, writing about what you know – that hoary and potentially limiting, even stultifying piece of advice – might be best seen as applying to the type of story you're thinking of writing rather than to the details of what happens within it and perhaps, with that in mind, a better precept might be to write about what you love, rather than what you have a degree of contempt for but will deign to lower yourself to, just to show the rest of us how it's done.
  • (6) Instead of ideological hoeing at Brook Farm, Hawthorne wanders, both in pen and person, through the old orchard, planted by a clergyman in his old age "when the neighbours laughed at the hoary-headed man for planting trees from which he could have no prospect of gathering fruit...
  • (7) The really sad thing about the Roberts affair is that we’ve ended up having yet another hoary old row about What Women Want, when hiding underneath it all along was a much more interesting conversation about what people do.
  • (8) She may well be right about that, but as the opening episode of the programme's 12th series was aired on Sunday night, the hoary adage about no publicity being bad publicity found itself, for the MP at least, being tested as never before.
  • (9) Following the "Trojan horse" affair, Michael Gove insisted that British schools teach "British values" without specifying what they might be: cue hoary gags about queuing, tea, diffidence and embarrassment.
  • (10) The tirade included the hoary cliche that when I get registration, she'll consider me worthy of avoiding.
  • (11) Evidence of this hoary wisdom appeared to come with this week's publication of the British Social Attitudes survey .
  • (12) The higher prevalences found among the non-colonial species (hoary, red and silver-haired bats) were consistent with similar studies.
  • (13) Prevalences for the species with sample sizes adequate for statistical analysis were, from high to low: hoary bat (Lasiurus cinereus), 11%; red bat (L. borealis), 5%; silver-haired bat (Lasionycteris noctivagans), 4%; little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus), 4%; big brown bat (Eptesicus fuscus), 3%; Keen's bat (Myotis keenii), 2%; and evening bat (Nycticeius humeralis), 2%.
  • (14) The first biographical sentence of the NFT's notes contains only one slight error, but this hoary chestnut has already misled several generations of Anglo-American viewers: "Born illegitimately in Copenhagen in 1889 to a poor and abused mother who died painfully two years later, Dreyer endured an arid childhood within a strict Lutheran adoptive family."
  • (15) World heritage forests are burning ; 1,000-year-old trees and the hoary peat beneath are reduced to char.
  • (16) Annual prevalence reported in silver-haired bats (Lasionycteris noctivagans) and hoary bats (Lasiurus cinereus) was variable in all three provinces.
  • (17) ROCK AND ROLL The two discuss their relation with the hoary beast... Morrissey: To me, "rock and roll" aren't really nasty words.
  • (18) In this speech recommending more "engagements", whether painful or ecstatic for those loosing the hi-tech weapons, we also witnessed that old standby "no-fly zone", which actually means "flying-and-bombing zone", and the hoary old self-satisfied reference to our having "change[d] the regimes" in Afghanistan and Iraq, as though Blair and his chums had merely been shuffling around tiny figurines on the Game of Thrones opening credits map .
  • (19) Some see in the talk of social mobility a possible revival of hoary old arguments about grammar schools that Cameron thought he’d killed off.
  • (20) Within individual species, significant differences between age groups were found only for hoary and red bats; in two species, juveniles had higher prevalences.

Stale


Definition:

  • (n.) The stock or handle of anything; as, the stale of a rake.
  • (v. i.) Vapid or tasteless from age; having lost its life, spirit, and flavor, from being long kept; as, stale beer.
  • (v. i.) Not new; not freshly made; as, stele bread.
  • (v. i.) Having lost the life or graces of youth; worn out; decayed.
  • (v. i.) Worn out by use or familiarity; having lost its novelty and power of pleasing; trite; common.
  • (v. t.) To make vapid or tasteless; to destroy the life, beauty, or use of; to wear out.
  • (a.) To make water; to discharge urine; -- said especially of horses and cattle.
  • (v. i.) That which is stale or worn out by long keeping, or by use.
  • (v. i.) A prostitute.
  • (v. i.) Urine, esp. that of beasts.
  • (v. t.) Something set, or offered to view, as an allurement to draw others to any place or purpose; a decoy; a stool pigeon.
  • (v. t.) A stalking-horse.
  • (v. t.) A stalemate.
  • (v. t.) A laughingstock; a dupe.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) This was due to the fact that stale bread was fed ad lib, rather than concentrates.
  • (2) That rock-star treatment then gets paid off with stale one-liners from the previous decade that sound like they were organized by shuffling notecards.
  • (3) Inside the carriage the temperature was stifling, the stench of unwashed bodies and stale urine overwhelming.
  • (4) In the first comments from Epstein’s representatives since the Guardian revealed on Friday that the prince had been named in a Florida court motion, an attorney for the disgraced financier said: “These are stale, rehashed allegations that lawyers are now attempting to repackage and spice up by adding the names of prominent people.” Virginia Roberts, who says she was 17 when she first met the Duke of York in London, claims she was forced to have sexual contact with him by Epstein, in London, New York and on his private island in the Caribbean during an “orgy”.
  • (5) Though the Bond series was in anything but trouble before Mendes’ arrival – and Craig’s – there was the sense of a certain amount of staleness towards the end of Pierce Brosnan’s run.
  • (6) The PassivHaus pioneers have focused on improving insulation, providing far better air-tightness and warming incoming air in winter, with the hotter stale air extracted from the house.
  • (7) Male, pale and stale is the epithet often used to describe the makeup of a charity board.
  • (8) The abortifacient property seems to decrease as the fruit becomes stale or ripe.
  • (9) He knew all about unconscious bias, was attuned to issues of diversity and was passionate about changing middle management composition which he said was “too male, stale and pale”.
  • (10) He resolutely refused to sit on the fence, and staleness, caused by watching stream upon stream of bad movies as well as good ones, never set in.
  • (11) Stale, flat and, alas, rapidly becoming unprofitable...” “What was he like as a person?” asked Dalgliesh.
  • (12) If you’re not bothered about instructions in another language, misprinted labels or biscuits that may be several months past their peak quality – but not stale – you can stock up for a fraction of the price you might pay in a regular shop.
  • (13) The measure of humidity, of peroxides and of the staleness of crumb are favourable for a good conservation.
  • (14) Overhead lights attached to ripped-out electrical wires hang suspended in the stale air and fading wallpaper peels off the walls like dead skin.
  • (15) For every 10 party hacks there were one or two sublime dissidents or innovators – Polanski and Wajda in Poland, Jancsó in Hungary, Dušan Makavejev in Yugoslavia – and we shouldn't throw out all these beautiful babies with the stale red bath water.
  • (16) Teams such as Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile and Algeria blew fresh air through the stale halls of international football's establishment with their teamwork and counter attacking flair.
  • (17) Northern Irish businesses are now able to trade across Europe, more people from across Europe have settled here and have provided a fresh perspective from the stale old sectarian divisions that Northern Ireland has been cursed with.
  • (18) This is welcome, as we believe that we offer a real alternative to the politics of austerity and the stale dogma of the Westminster parties.
  • (19) Americans have been hurting, but when we demanded solutions, too often Washington responded with the same stale mindset that led to failed policies like Obamacare.
  • (20) He should leave behind stale orthodoxies and trust his instinct that change is essential.