What's the difference between importune and inopportune?

Importune


Definition:

  • (a.) To request or solicit, with urgency; to press with frequent, unreasonable, or troublesome application or pertinacity; hence, to tease; to irritate; to worry.
  • (a.) To import; to signify.
  • (v. i.) To require; to demand.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Carr claimed that Kammerer's sexual importuning had become threatening, and in Riverside Park on August 13 1944, he defended himself with his boy scout knife, fatally stabbing Kammerer twice in the chest.
  • (2) The proceedings of animal body waste salvage plants are-as you know-connected with intense smell importunities of the immediate environment.
  • (3) He played in Harold Pinter's A Slight Ache at the Arts theatre and went on tour as Gerald Popkiss in Ben Travers's Rookery Nook, before giving an irresistible Roland Maule, the importunate playwright from Uckfield, in Coward's Present Laughter, at the Vaudeville in 1965.
  • (4) In his recent book, Marriage of Inconvenience , Robert Brownell claims that Effie was something of an adventurer, encouraged by her importunate family to marry Ruskin to forestall her father’s bankruptcy.
  • (5) Had I not been so concerned by this importune turn of events, I might have wondered why two of my oldest friends hadn't told me they were together or invited me to their wedding, and so I resolved to work humbly for Herbert for the next 12 years.
  • (6) This paper discusses three cases of importunate fracture, with skin breakdown and exposed fracture fragments, and their treatment with tobramycin beads (and in two cases, external fixateurs).
  • (7) If we take the view that German aggression above all else started the first world war, we may conclude the US should take a hard line against contemporary Chinese importuning.
  • (8) When she was four, her father had to relocate to Pennsylvania after importuning young male members of his staff.
  • (9) Neither are the tense years of the cold war, when Finland pursued a delicate balancing act between the importunate demands of its giant neighbour and its natural attachment to the west.

Inopportune


Definition:

  • (a.) Not opportune; inconvenient; unseasonable; as, an inopportune occurrence, remark, etc.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) To prevent inopportune switching, HO transcription is restricted to a specific period in the haploid cell cycle, which is just after, and dependent on, the start of the mitotic cell cycle.
  • (2) The Vatican's spokesman Federico Lombardi insisted the rite took place in "a specific situation in which excluding the girls would have been inopportune in light of the simple aim of communicating a message of love to all".
  • (3) This makes demolition surgery, which is not often well accepted by the patient, inopportune.
  • (4) Inopportune coagulation of blood in vessels is prevented by defense mechanisms, in which plasma inhibitors play an important role.
  • (5) Other morphological radiographic appearances include a risk of misinterpretation and thus inopportune, inadequate or hazardous operative procedures.
  • (6) While Mark Wallinger's Ebbsfleet horse is eagerly awaited, Manchester's B of the Bang, its steel shards falling at disconcertingly inopportune moments, failed.
  • (7) An allergic reaction could occur at a most inopportune time.
  • (8) Indeed, Vidal claimed the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 occurred because the Bush administration was "incompetent" and Bush himself was "inactive and inopportune".
  • (9) All of which feels like an inopportune context for Keith Bristow, the director general of the new National Crime Agency , to request more police powers.
  • (10) Metastases of secreting tumors are verily more rare, nevertheless they are indubitably a major indication for embolisation, since good results are achieved concerning inopportune secretions and repeat embolisations possible are a super advantage.
  • (11) Due to a perfect confluence of inopportune circumstances, I have not been able to get the Talkboard standings from last week tallied up just yet.
  • (12) I lose count of the many times I have been reprimanded for an inopportune frown, eye-roll, or death stare (teachers found the latter particularly unnerving).
  • (13) The timing of the event, the last of three which took place during the week, was seen as inopportune, given the killing of a NYPD officer just days before .
  • (14) Because of this favorable outcome, all inopportune treatments must be avoided, and abstention is the best attitude.
  • (15) Nevertheless, the need to be away from school such as during an important examination, or from work, may be inopportune.
  • (16) The today usual diagnostic procedures in the postoperative follow up control are able to detect liver metastases in most cases only in an inopportune stage for therapy.
  • (17) "It may seem inopportune to be questioning growth while we are faced with daily news of the effects of recession, but allegiance to growth is the most dominant feature of an economic and political system that has led us to the brink of disaster.
  • (18) The remarks, which are unusual in a country where courts do not generally comment on cases before publishing their written reasoning, were reportedly described as "inopportune" by the chairman of the judges' governing body, the CSM.
  • (19) Therefore the separation of the healthy sibling takes frequently an inopportune course and should be adjusted by psychological psychiatric intervention within primary prevention.
  • (20) This tendency, apparently inopportune from the aspects of caries prevention, ensures, however, a permanent low F- level above the enamel surface.