What's the difference between mediocre and special?

Mediocre


Definition:

  • (a.) Of a middle quality; of but a moderate or low degree of excellence; indifferent; ordinary.
  • (n.) A mediocre person.
  • (n.) A young monk who was excused from performing a portion of a monk's duties.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The interobserver variability of these indices is low (r greater than 0.96); reproducibility is good in patients with sinus rhythm but mediocre in atrial fibrillation.
  • (2) Only a few weeks ago he described English education as “mediocre”.
  • (3) This is a community where readers' patience for mediocrity is measured in seconds not minutes," added Thomson, the former Times editor who moved to New York to run the WSJ at the end of 2007 following Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of the paper's publisher, Dow Jones.
  • (4) The hospital laboratory was asked to provide for diffractometric analysis samples of the "mediocre" semens of quality similar enough to the "control" ones what concerns the percentage of motile spermatozoa (40 percent) and spermatozoan concentration.
  • (5) The unprecedented stimuli provided by central banks has kept activity ticking over, but proved unable to lift the global economy out of what Lagarde calls “the new mediocre”.
  • (6) I'm sure that advisers are at fault: mediocre people with PR degrees, eagerly advising on how to avoid the resentment of the masses.
  • (7) The value of conventional non-invasive methods is limited by a high failure rate (standard echocardiography in patients with chronic respiratory disease), a mediocre sensitivity, notably in detecting moderate PAH (electrocardiography, radiography of the chest, myocardial thalium scintigraphy) or a poor specificity (isotopic angiography).
  • (8) From the endocrine point of view, the mediocre prognosis is aggravated by high energy radiotherapy.
  • (9) The mediocre results among the group of inoperable patients suggest that other chemotherapy protocols need to be tested.
  • (10) This grid, used for the analysis of 527 randomized trials, showed that about one-half of them were of mediocre quality, the most frequent defects encountered being the multiplicity of assessment criteria, the lack of description of the subjects excluded, the absence of calculation of the number of subjects required before starting the trial and the small number of subjects in trials with non-significant results.
  • (11) Negative and mediocre results were more frequent in cases of gonarthrosis.
  • (12) Its contribution is obviously essential when, for technical reasons, arterial opacification is only mediocre (extended angiocardiopneumography).
  • (13) Stock Woolstencroft , architects of the dismal Stratford towers, are attempting to continue their march of mediocrity with schemes on the other side of the park.
  • (14) All the interviews supported the notion of an arbitrary norm for pay, which almost all firms felt was grossly and inappropriately high … The general view of search firms is that a lower norm would not materially affect what happens.” One headhunter said: “I think there are an awful lot of FTSE 100 CEOs who are pretty mediocre.” Another added: “I think that the wage drift over the past 10 years, or the salary drift, has been inexcusable, incomprehensible, and it is very serious for the social fabric of the country.” The findings are being made public just as an analysis by the High Pay Centre thinktank shows that the average pay of a chief executive – including pensions, share options and bonuses – stands at about £4.6m.
  • (15) A mediocre succession of atria and galleries, it does at least give artists space.
  • (16) Such has been the generally mediocre standard of Woods' play over the last two years, he has had perhaps only half a dozen realistic chances of winning on Sunday afternoon.
  • (17) This would happen especially if the school inspectorate Ofsted found they were failing, mediocre, fragile or coasting.
  • (18) For the svengali of mediocrity decreed that every year would culminate in the release of a single from the winner of his X Factor, and that this contribution to the lexicon would dutifully top the charts.
  • (19) Chemicals on the loop were Ca (abundant); Mg (marked); Si (mediocre); Ab, Ba, Fe (insignificant); Mn, Mo, Zn, P (trace).
  • (20) While the Lakers' two-year contract extension may end up being "an expensive mediocrity overpaying a franchise star in decline", as Grantland's Zach Lowe has put it , it could also have very well been the only move it could have sold to its fans.

Special


Definition:

  • (a.) Of or pertaining to a species; constituting a species or sort.
  • (a.) Particular; peculiar; different from others; extraordinary; uncommon.
  • (a.) Appropriate; designed for a particular purpose, occasion, or person; as, a special act of Parliament or of Congress; a special sermon.
  • (a.) Limited in range; confined to a definite field of action, investigation, or discussion; as, a special dictionary of commercial terms; a special branch of study.
  • (a.) Chief in excellence.
  • (n.) A particular.
  • (n.) One appointed for a special service or occasion.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The bank tellers who saw their positions filled by male superiors took special pleasure in going to the bank and keeping them busy.
  • (2) The frequency of rare fragile sites was studied among 240 children in special schools for subnormal intelligence (IQ 52-85).
  • (3) Theoretical findings on sterilization and disinfection measures are useless for the dental practice if their efficiency is put into question due to insufficient consideration of the special conditions of dental treatment.
  • (4) The Cole-Moore effect, which was found here only under a specific set of conditions, thus may be a special case rather than the general property of the membrane.
  • (5) In order to control noise- and vibration-caused diseases it was necessary not only to improve machines' quality and service conditions but also to pay special attention to the choice of operators and to the quality of monitoring their adaptation process.
  • (6) Despite of the increasing diagnostic importance of the direct determination of the parathormone which is at first available only in special institutions in these cases methodical problems play a less important part than the still not infrequent appearing misunderstanding of the adequate basic disease.
  • (7) Historical analysis shows that institutions and special education services spring from common, although not identical, societal and philosophical forces.
  • (8) The clinical usefulness of neonatal narcotic abstinence scales is reviewed, with special reference to their application in treatment.
  • (9) The very young history of clinical Psychology is demonstrating the value of clinical Psychologist in the socialistic healthy work and the international important positions of special education to psychological specialist of medicine.
  • (10) The differences might be due to an arrest of "specialization" in the regional expression of the different MHC isoforms.
  • (11) Mary's grief, which lasts for about the first half of the two-hour premiere special, is the finest work of the series so far by Michelle Dockery.
  • (12) The authors describe the special medical expertise of the psychiatrist and define 11 indicators, such as a patient's need for new psychotropic medication or the presence of symptoms requiring medical or laboratory procedures, that can be used to determine whether psychiatric expertise is needed.
  • (13) Many examples are given to demonstrate the applications of these programs, and special emphasis has been laid on the problem of treating a point in tissue with different doses per fraction on alternate treatment days.
  • (14) Doctors may plausibly make special claims qua doctors when they are treating disease.
  • (15) Following mass disasters and individual deaths, dentists with special training and experience in forensic odontology are frequently called upon to assist in the identification of badly mutilated or decomposed bodies.
  • (16) The indication of the DNA probe method would be considered in the four cases as follows, 1. necessity of the special equipment to isolate the pathogen, 2. necessity of the long period to isolate the pathogen, 3. existence of the cross reaction among the pathogen and relative organisms in the immunological procedure, 4. existence of the difficulty to identify the species of the pathogen by the ordinary procedure.
  • (17) This procedure generated a number of VI-like effects, supporting the notion that VI behavior can be construed as a special case of an interaction between the organism's function relating reinforcement susceptibilities to chain length and the experimenter's function relating probabilities of reinforcement to chain length.
  • (18) Special conditions apply for the scoring of a first and a last bone stage in a sequence, which will introduce less bias in the estimation of individual skeletal maturity with the MAT-method than with the TW-method.
  • (19) I also decided that the Kushner-Harvard relationship deserved special attention.
  • (20) A television camera scans the spread through microscope optics; computer and special purpose electronics process the video signals to generate run length histograms.