What's the difference between insipid and mawkish?

Insipid


Definition:

  • (a.) Wanting in the qualities which affect the organs of taste; without taste or savor; vapid; tasteless; as, insipid drink or food.
  • (a.) Wanting in spirit, life, or animation; uninteresting; weak; vapid; flat; dull; heavy; as, an insipid woman; an insipid composition.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) It is unacceptable in this city for us to play like that in a game of such importance to the people, against your local rivals that are at the bottom of the league, who fought for every single ball and we weren’t good enough.” Valencia’s captain, Paco Alcacer, also gave a scathing assessment of the team’s insipid performance.
  • (2) Browne said: "I have some unease that we are trying to pitch ourselves as a party that splits the difference between the other two … there's a sense of insipid centrism that is reassuringly unthreatening to people.
  • (3) The next morning, as the Lib Dems tried to come to terms with a media that had, overnight, recast their leader from insipid also-ran to hero, poll results that Clegg could not have dreamed of 24 hours earlier were still pouring out.
  • (4) In cases when the insipid signal was reinforced by salt food and the animal ate it (though during thirst it rejected the food), strong cortex activation was observed with the involvement of paraventricular parts of the hypothalamus.
  • (5) Instead, Cissé was left unattended to glance into the corner and you could almost hear the offers coming in for McClaren, who had given his players an expletive-filled rebuke after last week’s insipid defeat to Leicester , to pen a study on man-management.
  • (6) She's immediately more commanding and less insipid than Abi.
  • (7) Jol came into the game beleaguered as Fulham extended their sorry start to the season with an insipid defeat at Southampton last weekend and a mid-week Capital One Cup exit at the hands of Leicester City.
  • (8) When they did their efforts were insipid, summed up by an incident when Kevin Toner spent so long in space on the left waving for the ball that the crowd cheered when he received it, only for the teenager to put his cross straight out of play.
  • (9) Istiklal made Broadway look like a neon bauble, and the Champs Élysée seem insipid.
  • (10) England travelled to Rio de Janeiro on Wednesday night with their squad severely depleted by injury and the performance in the insipid 1-1 draw against the Republic of Ireland having drawn stinging criticism from a former national striker, Gary Lineker.
  • (11) Taarabt was not needed against an insipid Aston Villa .
  • (12) In terms of hypophyseal function, the ex-novo onset of postoperative pan-hypopituitarism and insipid diabetes was only observed in one case.
  • (13) The effectiveness of 1-deamino-8-d-arginine-vasopressin (DDAVP) has been evaluated in a case of insipid hypothalamo-hypophyseal familial diabetes.
  • (14) When you get to the one structure designed by Herzog & de Meuron at the end – a series of wooden barns for Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food movement – you sense the whole thing might actually have been a bit insipid if left in the hands of their restrained Swiss good taste.
  • (15) Insipid nationalism is a great way to displace the problems of “extreme capitalism” on to a particular ethnicity or minority group.
  • (16) Supporters jeered the side during another insipid United display.
  • (17) When lateral ventricle infusion of HS was performed in rats with a hereditary lack of Vp (diabetes insipidic rats) no pressor response was obtained.
  • (18) Bruce had described this game as “bigger than the FA Cup final” but his side failed to stir themselves sufficiently during an insipid first-half display that only sparked to life once Mahrez struck.
  • (19) Fletcher agreed that the insipid championship defence that has left United 17 points behind Liverpool, the leaders, had hurt the reputation of the club and players.
  • (20) For Leeds, whose last home win was in March against Ipswich, there was plenty of defiance on the terraces, with whole-hearted chants for the Leeds owner, Massimo Cellino, to go but there was little on the pitch as they produced another insipid home performance.

Mawkish


Definition:

  • (a.) Apt to cause satiety or loathing; nauseous; disgusting.
  • (a.) Easily disgusted; squeamish; sentimentally fastidious.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) They make you stand with a mangy dog and force you to be mawkish: "This is Fido - he needs a new home.
  • (2) She is single-minded, but she ramps it up, as if to sabotage journalistic attempts to frame her life in mawkish, triumph-over-adversity terms.
  • (3) "Without getting too mawkish about it I come from a family which, like lots of families, has been very heavily affected and disfigured by the revolutions and the wars of the last sort of century.
  • (4) It is difficult to observe, without the option of yelling and swearing, how disingenuous this is, how slimy and mawkish for a government happy to live with the idea of people living in squalor, in fuel poverty, going hungry, suddenly to find itself unable to bear the idea of a child in a smoky car.
  • (5) When I was young, vegetarianism was still a cult activity practised by filthy, bendy-boned hippies or mawkishly sentimental teenage girls who would probably be keen to renege on the whole non-meat-eating deal if only they had the strength to lift a whole steak into a pan.
  • (6) Now, for all that we mawkishly spray the bicycles of dead cyclists white and chain them to lamp posts, for all that we heap cellophane-wrapped flowers in remembrance of murder victims and lost celebrities alike, we have never been worse at mourning.
  • (7) It doesn't do to get mawkish – it's not the end of the world, certainly not for Ross, who is generally thought to feed on adversity and get a bit lazy in good times.
  • (8) Jacqueline Wilson's brand of naive narrative prevents her books from being mawkish or sentimental.
  • (9) The endless mawkish comparisons, wailing headlines and maudlin snippets.
  • (10) If that makes it sound mawkish or grim, it really isn't: there is sadness and there are regrets, but most of all there is plenty of laughter, lots of fun, tenderness, honesty and plain speaking.
  • (11) He was very sensitive to the danger that unless they were careful the film could become very mawkish and sentimental, "and there were a lot of nuns present all the time, which always makes you feel a little bit irreverent.
  • (12) He showed too that he has a nice line in self-deprecation and is capable of altering his register from light to shade, even if the lower-decibel passages sometimes veered toward the mawkish and had one or two unkind voices in the press corps recalling the notorious "quiet man" performance of Iain Duncan Smith.
  • (13) He is indeed a wonderfully entertaining poet, and his fine judgment in such matters persists in the unprecedentedly personal final poems, "Maren" and "Iona", their tone, as he rightly thought, "not mawkish .
  • (14) They're corny, mawkish – but they're shameless enough to get you to press the button.
  • (15) In the light of this merrily unceasing gravy train, it's perhaps a bit rich that anyone, anywhere, is only now criticising Hologram Tupac for making money off a dead man; the past 16 years have been an object lesson in music industry exploitation, and surely it's impossible to sink lower than that mawkish Elton John duet anyway?
  • (16) People say John Lewis has been canny by making an annual mawkish short film instead of having someone shouting: “It’s deals deals deals at John Lewis this Christmas!”, but this is really taking it up a level.
  • (17) Perhaps there is resentment because the clemency and respect that are being mawkishly displayed now by some and haughtily demanded of the rest of us at the impending, solemn ceremonial funeral, are values that her government and policies sought to annihilate.
  • (18) True, none of the identikit ballads that have hogged the Christmas No 1 slot since the demise of the Spice Girls are giving Unchained Melody's publishers a squeaky bum – it's unlikely, for instance, that Shayne Ward's That's My Goal will ever be "our song" for any couple – but, Beatles and Spice Girls aside, these ballads are merely continuing a late December tradition of mawkishness and base sentimentality.
  • (19) Facebook Twitter Pinterest It’s an intriguing take, suggesting an ET-like robot movie with a Spielbergian sense of optimism about the unknown that will hopefully avoid the mawkish sentimentality of the US film-maker’s own AI.
  • (20) After nearly five decades, I have never been able to tell you that I love you, for fear you will see this as trite and mawkish.