What's the difference between indecisive and vacillate?

Indecisive


Definition:

  • (a.) Not decisive; not bringing to a final or ultimate issue; as, an indecisive battle, argument, answer.
  • (a.) Undetermined; prone to indecision; irresolute; unsettled; wavering; vacillating; hesitating; as, an indecisive state of mind; an indecisive character.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Another indecisive election result could do for it.
  • (2) This dilemma is at the heart of many people's anguished indecision over the wisdom of our action in Iraq.
  • (3) The decision to drop the tax is a personal blow for Hollande and only one of a number of government U-turns since he was elected, fuelling criticism that he is indecisive and lacking presidential authority.
  • (4) She has already started her rounds of the constituencies to garner support, and has profited from Johnson’s indecision on whether he would or would not return to parliament.
  • (5) I graduated in 2012 and since then i've worked some freelance work in sound engineering, photography and videography and taken on only one part time job, moved between two cities generally being indecisive about my future.
  • (6) The procedure can be done smoothly and quickly without any indecision as to its consequences.
  • (7) Pringle found these conferences “brilliant and often informative”, but “they used to drive me nearly frantic because of the difficulty of getting a decision.’ Katharine Whitehorn , the women’s page editor, famously declared that “the editor’s indecision is final”, but although Astor would sometimes allow his journalists to vent opposing views in print as well in person – Nora Beloff and Robert Stephens on Israel and Palestine, for example – he always had the final say.
  • (8) The reported arms deal comes at a time when Saudi Arabia, a traditional US ally, has sharply criticised the United States for what it regards as indecisiveness on Syria, as well as Washington's attempts at reconciliation with Iran, Saudi Arabia's regional rival.
  • (9) It was stressed that besides the kidney functional state the state of certain basic clinical indecision had also to be given consideration, as blood pressure values, cardiovascular system state, presence of difficult-to-be-corrected anemia as well as certain social factors.
  • (10) Elastica, The Menace (Deceptive, 2000) Hip, arty and bristling with pop hooks, Elastica's eponymous debut was one of Britpop's finest hours, but fluctuating line-ups, indecision and heroin dogged the follow-up.
  • (11) Ed Miliband was either too indecisive in his rejection of Blairism, or simply an inadequate exponent of that view.
  • (12) Johnson is the master-builder of that image, deflecting every lie, every gaffe, dishonesty and U-turn with some self-deprecating metaphor: calling his feigned indecision “veering all over the place like a shopping trolley” was worth a world of worthy platitudes.
  • (13) Some, however, expressed frustration at what they saw as indecisive tactics by their senior command, as well as a general lack of police numbers and of riot-trained backup officers.
  • (14) The word is none-too flattering, meaning being indecisive, or failing to have an opinion on something – behaviour that Germans often attribute to Merkel.
  • (15) He indirectly signalled that Europe's attempts to get to grips with the crisis over the past 18 months had been disjointed, indecisive, and unproductive.
  • (16) The fear of looking ridiculous is one of the primary reasons that bold decisions like this are not taken, because when you start weighing up the myriad ways a particular course of action could go wrong, then you become riddled with self-doubt, second-guess yourself and become paralysed with fear and indecision.
  • (17) In a finer grain analysis, the stable and commonly endorsed individual PDQ items were compared with previously reported panic disorder and normal control subjects, which showed that the present sample was more like the panic patients in their tendency to see themselves as rather unassertive, indecisive, self-critical, and emotional individuals who are easily frustrated and feel rejected when criticized by others.
  • (18) A government audit also found about half of the reconstruction budget had yet to be distributed owing to red tape and indecision over how the affected communities should be rebuilt.
  • (19) This is about much more than Tony Blair's slipperiness or Gordon Brown's indecisiveness.
  • (20) For months she has held to a hard line; now her toughness is beginning to look like indecisiveness.

Vacillate


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To move one way and the other; to reel or stagger; to waver.
  • (v. t.) To fluctuate in mind or opinion; to be unsteady or inconstant; to waver.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Significant associations were found in the relationship of suicide potential to verbal attack by spouse (p = .03), vacillation in the last two weeks (p = .02), and vacillation since the first serious discussion of divorce (p = .02).
  • (2) On reversed sequences they vacillated between reproducing the events as modeled and "correcting" them to canonical order.
  • (3) Culture conditions may provide an environment that permits proliferating glial cells to vacillate in their selection of a specific lineage.
  • (4) Trump had criticised Obama for vacillation and weakness.
  • (5) Relations between the White House and Congress have vacillated between close coordination one moment and leaving the other in the dark the next.
  • (6) Traditionally, NGOs vacillate between guilt and hope in their communications.
  • (7) Stuck between the cultist Friends of Radio 3 and Global Radio’s sprightly three-times-the-size Classic FM, the network vacillates between populist copying and public service broadcasting stodge.
  • (8) When first confronted by Arab political revolutions, Britain vacillated, reluctant to abandon useful and grubby friendship with corrupt regimes.
  • (9) Later she acquiesced in Ronald Reagan's decision to bomb Gaddafi, and famously told George Bush senior not to go wobbly on her as he vacillated over ousting Saddam's forces, which had invaded Kuwait.
  • (10) Chancellor George Osborne has made it even harder for small businesses to compete against multinationals by cutting the corporate tax rate, and presided over a collapse in business investment, particularly in the hugely promising 'green sector', which has suffered hugely from the government's inept vacillating on energy policy.
  • (11) He isn't, as Miliband is accused of being, weak, vacillating, unadventurous and academic.
  • (12) Much of his work in the last half of his life, and much of his continuing happiness, was inspired by Penny the second, whose enormous strengths of decency and determination creatively challenged his own vacillation and reluctance to make moral judgments.
  • (13) As one works through the stressful event, the victim vacillates between intrusion and avoidance, with the magnitude of those oscillations being much stronger at first.
  • (14) Major procedures included object permanence, vacillation, memory for locations and pictures, and reaction to unfamiliar adults and to separation.
  • (15) In Study 2, conducted four-months after Study 1, stable pairs (20 maintained mutual, MM) and vacillating ones (six growing mutual, GM; 11 decayed mutual, DM) were selected.
  • (16) Mitt Romney has expressed qualified concern about climate change over the years, and then vacillated about how much of it is human-caused and whether we should try to do anything about it.
  • (17) In the space of just a few weeks Moscow has been making the weather on the crisis – by seizing the initiative where the US and others have vacillated and failed.
  • (18) The cast of The Five vacillated between feigned solemnity and jocular NFL pregame oafishness.
  • (19) Most patients showed little denial throughout the period of observation, but more vulnerable patients tended to vacillate between denial and acceptance.
  • (20) Gerwig played the vacillating temptress in Hannah Takes the Stairs , the long-distance lover in Nights and Weekends , a jittery scream queen in the Duplass brothers’ Baghead .