What's the difference between maudlin and mawkish?

Maudlin


Definition:

  • (a.) Tearful; easily moved to tears; exciting to tears; excessively sentimental; weak and silly.
  • (a.) Drunk, or somewhat drunk; fuddled; given to drunkenness.
  • (n.) Alt. of Maudeline

Example Sentences:

  • (1) No, he says, he didn't get intimations of mortality, he didn't get maudlin, he didn't think about how he'd never work again.
  • (2) A key scene sees a puppet Kim Jong-il sing a maudlin number by that name.
  • (3) The first day (there is more in front of the Senate Thursday) was like an endless wake, which led to rambling meditation, many maudlin congratulations, thanks and eulogies from representatives who will, at most, regret losing the chance to whack their favorite economic piñata.
  • (4) Why am I suddenly maudlin about old photographs of tiny children in school uniform and haunted by memories of nursery teas and long afternoons in the park watching small boys chase a ball?
  • (5) The endless mawkish comparisons, wailing headlines and maudlin snippets.
  • (6) But his ability to abruptly switch tack and tone, into poetry or maudlin song, makes him a fascinating performer.
  • (7) But you listen to the music and it has this maudlin depression and beauty at the same time."
  • (8) Gilbert is against a kind of maudlin attachment to grief, which doesn't progress.
  • (9) I trust the confessional quality will be instructive and not taken as maudlin or pseudo-Proustian.
  • (10) But being focused on making plans, such as arranging my own funeral, has stopped me from becoming maudlin.
  • (11) After the shooting, the boys’ respective journals were found and while Dylan’s was full of maudlin and often nonsensical dreams about killing himself, Harris’s was full of violent and sadistic fantasies about hurting others.
  • (12) She is far from maudlin, having expressed a wish to be cremated in a vodka-bottle shaped coffin before having her ashes scattered on the island of Lindisfarne, off the north-east coast.

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.