What's the difference between ineffable and unsayable?

Ineffable


Definition:

  • (a.) Incapable of being expresses in words; unspeakable; unutterable; indescribable; as, the ineffable joys of heaven.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) There was that, and there was the ineffable presence of David Attenborough.
  • (2) The moral worldview of the devoted actor is dominated by what Edmund Burke referred to as “the sublime”: a need for the “delightful terror” of a sense of power, destiny, a giving over to the ineffable and unknown.
  • (3) Maybe, SCOTUSblog was itself playing at a little performance art, a commentary on the search for specificity and certainty in a series of cases that deal primarily with the ineffable realm of human emotions.
  • (4) In his volume of autobiographical essays, A Small Boy and Others , Henry James remembers the Broadway of his youth, where he first saw paintings: “Ineffable, unsurpassable, those hours of initiation which the Broadway of the 1850s had been.
  • (5) Although she was born in Bamako, her parents were from Wassoulou, the fertile south of Mali, and much of her music is based on the idioms of that area, particularly the ancient, bluesy music of the hunters, who you can meet in their jackets covered with mirrors, hooves and the tails of animals, radiating ineffable cool.
  • (6) Where is the entertainer who, quite unbidden, will lead us out of the woods toward a better tomorrow - all the while bravely refusing to compromise their ineffable cool by removing their sunglasses?
  • (7) There's almost nothing to Let the Music Use You – a bassline, an unchanging rhythm track based around an insistent synthetic cowbell noise, a two-note keyboard part, a synthesiser that shifts from a melancholy wash of sound into a delirious, joyful ascending chord sequence and a vocal by a forgotten singer called Ricky Dillard who sounds, for the most part, as if he's making it up on the hoof – and yet it captures that weird, ineffable dancefloor transcendence perfectly.
  • (8) But as the philosopher Gillian Rose once argued, sometimes we retreat into the language of ineffability because we are trying "to mystify something we dare not understand, because we fear that it may be all too understandable."
  • (9) The occasion was relieved for May and Hammond only by Jeremy Corbyn’s ineffable ability to turn victory at the dispatch box into fumbling defeat.
  • (10) A great fashion moment in film is when someone wears something that is supposed to look good, gives onlookers ineffable joy and, finally, so utterly suits the character.
  • (11) A broad range of delegates were ineffably moved by Hu's speech, which contained heartrending lines such as "the scientific outlook on development is the theoretical guidance the party must adhere to for a long time".
  • (12) This will be Jones’s last election as Welsh Labour leader, and his party may yet discover how much they will miss the ineffable qualities of a lucky general.
  • (13) Here, several aspects of the analytic process which allow for the understanding of ineffable experiences in the analysand's history and the analytic situation are investigated: specifically, primal repression, metaphor, and the role of speech in free association.
  • (14) If food is spiritual, then modern "celebrity chefs" have become our priests or gurus, druidic conduits to the ineffable.
  • (15) It's a bit Carry On, a bit Ealing, quintessentially English, ineffably funny.
  • (16) The complaint that the iPad doesn't do something sufficiently specific, or sufficiently path-breaking, ignores the lesson of the iPod's success: if its feel, its looks, and its whole ineffable personality manages to seize enough imaginations, it will triumph.
  • (17) Nothing would be left to chance; everything would now be perfectly, ineffably, Chaplin.
  • (18) There is, as everyone who meets him seems to note, something ineffably sad about his eyes, even when he laughs, which he does in a gruff, mirthless shout.
  • (19) And support came from the ineffable Jacob ("vox populi, vox dei") Rees-Mogg, who unwound himself from the bench and took off his phantom top hat to point out that it was vitally important for such decisions to be taken quickly because business moves quickly.
  • (20) As he performed his first handstand his legs seemed to stretch to the heavens and with ineffable style and grace he completed one of the most consummate pommel displays the Olympic stage has seen.

Unsayable


Definition:

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Privatisation would destroy that at a stroke.” Trevor Phillips says the unsayable about race and multiculturalism Read more The government is considering privatisation as one of a number of options for Channel 4, which is commercially run but owned by the state.
  • (2) And the oath of “believing in freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from abuse …” would arguably entail, from the prime minister, her cabinet, her party and her Ukip fellow travellers, a rather more rigorous rejection of Islamophobia, so that Muslim women in shopping centres didn’t have to be dragged along the ground by their hijabs in a newly emboldened climate of “saying the unsayable”.
  • (3) Comedy wants you to say the unsayable; the celebrity industry would rather you didn’t.
  • (4) Where it was possible at last for Egyptians to stand side by side and say what was previously unsayable.
  • (5) That No comes from deep within – and he can never unsay it.
  • (6) Lessing delivers the occasional blast of dry humour, but it is her intellectual honesty, her ability to say the unsayable, which has made her famous.
  • (7) "Germans would probably do themselves a service by leaving the euro, but this is something that is unsayable in German politics."
  • (8) Many of these are people with posh names, liberal-baiting sayers of the unsayable – the “unsayable” generally just being routine racism, sexism and idiocy.
  • (9) For a potential £400,000 he was prepared to say the unsayable.
  • (10) It can be an interesting exercise to think the otherwise unsayable.
  • (11) The unsayable always has that strange cliff-edge allure, and quite a few comedians forage their material in no-go areas.
  • (12) "I like working in an environment of creative confidence and respect – where nothing is unsayable, so long as you find the right way to say it."
  • (13) One council leader I met dared openly to say the unsayable – there was no initiative on benefit nor incentive to work that could break the cycle of welfare dependency because there was no local worthwhile work.
  • (14) Mindful of the damage his win-at-all-costs moves had wrought, Netanyahu lost no time trying to unsay what he had said.
  • (15) His unsayable thing about women is that they [we] all want to be ravished.
  • (16) There are things you can never unsay, that you cannot say and still remain friends, and that would have been one of them.
  • (17) Here was a writer who said the unsayable, thought the unthinkable, and fearlessly put it down there, in all its raw emotional and intellectual chaos.
  • (18) Joan provoked incredulity mixed with a weird kind of rapture, as she said the unsayable – and they doubled over in laughter again and again.
  • (19) As Ken Clarke did in 1990 when his colleagues ummed and ahed and allowed themselves to be browbeaten by Margaret Thatcher and her praetorian guard, so Purnell has said the previously unsayable - that the prime minister must go.
  • (20) I was cited everywhere as having said the unsayable: that it is possible for a woman to dislike her children, even to regret having brought them into the world.