What's the difference between lenient and soft?

Lenient


Definition:

  • (a.) Relaxing; emollient; softening; assuasive; -- sometimes followed by of.
  • (a.) Mild; clement; merciful; not rigorous or severe; as, a lenient disposition; a lenient judge or sentence.
  • (n.) A lenitive; an emollient.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) This was less than predicted by many observers – each of the 12 offences had a maximum term of between two and 10 years – and immediately the attorney general's office received calls from the public asking it to look at whether it was too lenient.
  • (2) From Brussels our Europe editor, Ian Traynor , provides this analysis of this morning's events: The eurozone permanent bailout fund, the European Stability Mechanism, has been given a green light to come into force two months later than planned following the supreme court decision in Karlsruhe which arrived with much more lenient caveats than had been predicted.
  • (3) Cable's strongly worded intervention came after parliament's spending watchdog, the public accounts committee, said HMRC was "way too lenient" on companies that use clever accounting tricks to pay very little or no tax.
  • (4) Even in the few cases where prosecution does take place, sentences tend to be lenient.
  • (5) Other estimates suggest little more than £150m Even so, as Johnson says, this is all lenient compared with equivalent rates in New York, where they also pay local income tax.
  • (6) All patients were medication free, and REM latency was explicitly defined using both strict and lenient criteria.
  • (7) That ruling could make it more likely that other lenders will start taking a more lenient view when it comes to older mortgage borrowers.
  • (8) One partial explanation for the sudden drop in admissions may be that Swedish courts have given more lenient sentences for drug offences following a ruling of the country's supreme court in 2011.
  • (9) I would maintain that marking has become more lenient.
  • (10) Will the big names be treated more leniently than the smaller ones?
  • (11) To date, Czechoslovakia has had a fairly lenient attitude toward the sterilization of women; only recently has it been applied to men as well.
  • (12) Furthermore, intrinsically motivated subjects chose higher performance standards than had been demonstrated to them in the lenient-demand condition, and also arranged leaner schedules of self reinforcement over all demand conditions than had been demonstrated to them, compared to extrinsically motivated subjects.
  • (13) "It appears to me the sentence was unduly lenient and the overall criminality was not reflected," he told the court.
  • (14) No prison for Colorado college student who ‘raped a helpless young woman' Read more Despite the guilty verdict by a jury, Judge Patrick Butler decided not to send Wilkerson to prison this week with a ruling that closely resembles the lenient sentencing of former Stanford swimmer Brock Turner .
  • (15) Tom Gosling, reward partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, said: "There is a wider question of differences in regulatory approach at the global level creating an uneven playing field, and a risk of geographic arbitrage in favour of jurisdictions that are perceived to be more lenient."
  • (16) He cited Romney's record as governor of Massachusetts, which had an even more lenient policy, allowing criminals out on parole to vote.
  • (17) Anthony Bosch – who choked back tears in court and said the clinic was a legitimate business gone awry – sought a more lenient term because of his cooperation in the investigation, but US District Judge Darrin Gayles refused.
  • (18) External conditions were three demand conditions (stringent, variable, and lenient).
  • (19) Results include the findings that (a) performance is an inverted-U shaped function of exactingness, (b) performance is better under incentives when environments are lenient but not when they are exacting, (c) the interaction between exactingness and incentives does not obtain when an incentives function fails to discriminate sharply between good and bad performance, and (d) when the negative effects of exactingness on performance are eliminated, performance increases with exactingness.
  • (20) "It was a very lenient sentence," said Shahryar Khan, a retired diplomat and a former Pakistan Cricket Board chairman, speaking by telephone from Lahore.

Soft


Definition:

  • (superl.) Easily yielding to pressure; easily impressed, molded, or cut; not firm in resisting; impressible; yielding; also, malleable; -- opposed to hard; as, a soft bed; a soft peach; soft earth; soft wood or metal.
  • (superl.) Not rough, rugged, or harsh to the touch; smooth; delicate; fine; as, soft silk; a soft skin.
  • (superl.) Hence, agreeable to feel, taste, or inhale; not irritating to the tissues; as, a soft liniment; soft wines.
  • (superl.) Not harsh or offensive to the sight; not glaring; pleasing to the eye; not exciting by intensity of color or violent contrast; as, soft hues or tints.
  • (superl.) Not harsh or rough in sound; gentle and pleasing to the ear; flowing; as, soft whispers of music.
  • (superl.) Easily yielding; susceptible to influence; flexible; gentle; kind.
  • (superl.) Expressing gentleness, tenderness, or the like; mild; conciliatory; courteous; kind; as, soft eyes.
  • (superl.) Effeminate; not courageous or manly, weak.
  • (superl.) Gentle in action or motion; easy.
  • (superl.) Weak in character; impressible.
  • (superl.) Somewhat weak in intellect.
  • (superl.) Quiet; undisturbed; paceful; as, soft slumbers.
  • (superl.) Having, or consisting of, a gentle curve or curves; not angular or abrupt; as, soft outlines.
  • (superl.) Not tinged with mineral salts; adapted to decompose soap; as, soft water is the best for washing.
  • (superl.) Applied to a palatal, a sibilant, or a dental consonant (as g in gem, c in cent, etc.) as distinguished from a guttural mute (as g in go, c in cone, etc.); -- opposed to hard.
  • (superl.) Belonging to the class of sonant elements as distinguished from the surd, and considered as involving less force in utterance; as, b, d, g, z, v, etc., in contrast with p, t, k, s, f, etc.
  • (n.) A soft or foolish person; an idiot.
  • (adv.) Softly; without roughness or harshness; gently; quietly.
  • (interj.) Be quiet; hold; stop; not so fast.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) In conclusion, the efficacy of free tissue transfer in the treatment of osteomyelitis is geared mainly at enabling the surgeon to perform a wide radical debridement of infected and nonviable soft tissue and bone.
  • (2) Bilateral symmetric soft-tissue masses posterior to the glandular tissue with accompanying calcifications should suggest the diagnosis.
  • (3) None of the other soft tissue layers-ameloblasts, stratum intermedium or dental follicle--immunostain for TGF-beta 1.
  • (4) The cotransfected cells do not grow in soft agar, but show enhanced soft agar growth relative to controls in the presence of added aFGF and heparin.
  • (5) It was hypothesized that compensatory restraining influences of surrounding soft tissues prevented a more severe facial malformation from occurring.
  • (6) After the diagnosis of a soft-tissue injury (sprain, strain, or contusion) has been made, treatment must include an initial 24- to 48-hour period of RICE.
  • (7) It is a specific clinical picture with extensive soft tissue gas and swelling of the forearm.
  • (8) Benign and malignant epithelial and soft tissue tumors of the skin were usually negatively stained with MoAb HMSA-2.
  • (9) The patient, a 12 year-old boy, showed a soft white yellowish mycotic excrescence with clear borders which had followed the introduction of a small piece of straw into the cornea.
  • (10) In open fractures especially in those with severe soft tissue damage, fracture stabilisation is best achieved by using external fixators.
  • (11) A distally based posterior tibial artery adipofascial flap with skin graft was used for the reconstruction of soft tissue defects over the Achilles tendon in three cases and over the heel in three cases.
  • (12) The third patient was using an extended-wear soft contact lens for correction of residual myopia.
  • (13) Computed tomography (CT) is the most sensitive radiologic study for detecting these tumors, which usually are small, round, sharply marginated, and of homogeneous soft tissue density.
  • (14) The latter indicated that, despite the smaller size of the digital image, they were adequate for resolving clinically significant soft-tissue densities.
  • (15) We isolated soft agar colonies (a-subclones) and sub-clones from foci (h-subclones) of both hybrids, and, as a control, subclones of cells from random areas without foci of one hybrid (BS181 p-subclones).
  • (16) Three of the tumours represented primary soft tissue lesions, while locally recurrent tumour or pulmonary metastases were studied from the 4 skeletal tumours, all of which had been diagnosed previously as Ewing's sarcomas.
  • (17) The technique is based on a multiple regression analysis of the renal curves and separate heart and soft tissue curves which together represent background activity.
  • (18) A hospital-based case-control study on soft tissue sarcomas (STS) was conducted in 1983-84 in Torino and in Padova (Italy).
  • (19) This phenomenon can have a special significance for defining the vitality in inflammation of bone tissue, in burns and in necrosis of soft tissues a.a. of the Achilles tendon.
  • (20) Thirty patients required a second operation to an area previously addressed reflecting inadequacies in technique, the unpredictability of bone grafts, and soft-tissue scarring.