What's the difference between impractical and quixotic?

Impractical


Definition:

  • (a.) Not practical.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) A Health Ministry spokesman answers that the campaign has, in fact, stressed that use of condoms for "safe sex" does not provide complete protection but, since the only 100% sure protection, celibacy, is completely impractical, even partial protection is better than none.
  • (2) However, the slow CNS tissue uptake of vitamin E requires chronic dosing, making it an impractical agent for the treatment of acute neural injury.
  • (3) Computed tomographic scanning is an effective method of examining the pelvis but is time consuming and may be impractical in cases of severe injury.
  • (4) He has also declared that he will deport 11 million illegal immigrants, which opponents say is both heartless and impractical.
  • (5) Its merits are particularly obvious with multiparameter optimization where the gradient method, so far the only one employed in microbiology from a variety of optimization methods (e.g., refs, 9 and 10), becomes impractical because of the excessive number of experiments required.
  • (6) FK 506 is a superior immunosuppressive agent that should improve patient survival after the commonly performed transplant procedures, make feasible transplantations that have been previously impractical, allow immune intervention for serious autoimmune diseases, and create a better spin-off understanding of basic biologic processes including signal transduction.
  • (7) Current methods for determining plasma prekallikrein, one of three zymogens of the contact phase of plasma proteolysis, are laborious and impractical for general use in a clinical laboratory.
  • (8) It is impractical to compare all of these tests simultaneously on the same group of patients.
  • (9) The endotracheal tube remains the gold standard, although its universal use is impractical, while the EOA would appear to be an effective alternative and an important airway adjunct in the prehospital phase of CPR.
  • (10) CT is theoretically the most accurate method to assess contracture, but it is impractical because of expense and time requirements.
  • (11) Kenya has vowed to close the world’s biggest refugee camp within a year and send hundreds of thousands of Somalis back to their war-torn homeland or on to other countries, a plan decried by aid and human rights groups as dangerous, illegal and impractical.
  • (12) Britain and the US, both of which have strong financial sectors, have always been lukewarm about transaction taxes, arguing that they are impractical and will drive business offshore.
  • (13) Despite these favorable correlations, Doppler peak gradient generally overestimated catheterization peak-to-peak gradient (1 to 53 mm Hg), making it impractical for clinical use.
  • (14) The authors believe the ability to isolate and analyze acinar preparations from the rabbit lacrimal gland will facilitate various studies of acinar cell biochemistry and physiology that would be impractical with the relatively smaller amounts of material that can be obtained from rat or mouse exorbital lacrimal glands.
  • (15) Every modern government returned with a majority looks to take advantage of its first few months when the opposition is in disarray by ditching some impractical pledges (“taking out the trash” in the parlance of special advisers), pushing through unpopular measures, maybe adding some nasty ones, while seeking to establish a narrative that will cause their electoral rivals difficulties once they have finished mourning the poll win that never came.
  • (16) Although it is desirable that tests predict the presence of small tumours, the high requirements for sensitivity and specificity at current prevalence rates for lung cancer make this goal impractical.
  • (17) Although usable portal images can be acquired, presence of the large mirror renders the system impractical in many treatment geometries.
  • (18) It has a place in patients in whom endoscopic or radiological placement is impractical.
  • (19) The previously published procedure for calculation of rate constants associated with the death of microbial cells is shown to be so sensitive to variation in experimental data as to render it impractical for this application.
  • (20) Extensive overlap between male and female heart rates under normal and hypothermic conditions makes this technique an industrially impractical method for determining embryonic sex.

Quixotic


Definition:

  • (a.) Like Don Quixote; romantic to extravagance; absurdly chivalric; apt to be deluded.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Tap the relevant details into Google, though, and the real names soon appear before your eyes: the boss in question, stern and yet oddly quixotic, is Phyllis Westberg of Harold Ober Associates.
  • (2) It also highlights how mass-resettlement is not a quixotic policy; it has been achieved before in the aftermath of a bloody war – and could be achieved again.
  • (3) Based more on disappointment in McConnell than Bevin's promise (or crazy talk), his otherwise quixotic campaign (unseating a five-term minority leader) has gotten national attention and support from the likes of the Senate Conservative Fund (early backers of Cruz and Lee, as well as Cotton) and Palin.
  • (4) Asked why he had not relied on US intelligence for a claim with extraordinary legal implications, Trump offered a quixotic reply: “Because I don’t want to do anything that’s going to violate any strength of an agency.
  • (5) Gilliam also said that he would be restarting work on The Man Who Killed Don Quixote next year.
  • (6) There are further echoes, inevitably, of films about the quixotic, sometimes cruel exercise of journalistic power in Citizen Kane and the Sweet Smell of Success.
  • (7) Gilliam himself took to the stage to reveal plans for his long-delayed film version of the story of Don Quixote - the feature he was forced to abandon in 1999 after a freak storm destroyed his set.
  • (8) The world is flat in ways the high-flying global theoreticians don't always acknowledge; these days, even someone from the materially fortunate parts of the world – a man with a ruddy complexion, a woman in a Prada suit – is pulled aside for what is quixotically known as "random screening".
  • (9) It appears the Don Quixote that finally makes it into multiplexes will be radically different from that which might once have been seen.
  • (10) 4.31pm BST Texas Senator Ted Cruz, whose quixotic campaign to "defund" Obamacare was the stick in the spokes that got us here, could – could – cause a default all by himself, Joshua Green reports in Bloomberg BusinessWeek: How could this happen?
  • (11) The hard graft for centre-left parties across Europe is to turn this around – not to be a 21st-century Don Quixote forever tilting at 19th- or 20th-century windmills.
  • (12) Perhaps it is the classically gaunt face, or maybe it is the aquiline nose, but he looks exactly like Don Quixote.
  • (13) LA cyclists, until then lonely, quixotic figures, felt emboldened to organise their own rides, using force of numbers to co-exist with traffic in mass rides, and for races acting like flash mobs, briefly sealing off an alley here, a boulevard there.
  • (14) Royal Ballet Christmas season Instead of its regular Christmas staples – The Nutcracker, Cinderella or The Tales of Beatrix Potter – the Royal is courting the festive box office with two recent productions: Christopher Wheeldon’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Carlos Acosta’s Don Quixote.
  • (15) Remember Yusor Abu-Salha as more than just a victim of the Chapel Hill shooting | Rana Odeh Read more But even setting aside the questions that must be asked by law enforcement – and even now, we are learning more about the accused killer, including details of a stash of weapons he reportedly had at his apartment – the local community, and America at large, must begin the quixotic mission of trying to find deeper meaning in the tragedy.
  • (16) Suddenly we've discovered in our midst an exotic prancer, a quixotic chancer, an electronic Elgar who has penned some of the gaudiest, most soaring rock and roll anthems to be heard in a decade.
  • (17) Breezeblocks is the sort of idiosyncratic indie we'd imagine bands we've never heard such as Swell Maps or Arab Strap would have purveyed, affirming that there are quixotic imaginations at work here.
  • (18) He told Podemos’s followers to dream and, like that noble madman Don Quixote, “take their dreams seriously”.
  • (19) He made his name with quixotic docs about Elvis, medieval animal trials and US murder sprees, and went on to direct Man on Wire , which won him an Oscar in 2009, as well as films such as 2012's Shadow Dancer .
  • (20) Lars Von Trier is known for being unpredictable, quixotic, puckish and deliberately provocative.