What's the difference between menial and understair?
Menial
Definition:
(n.) Belonging to a retinue or train of servants; performing servile office; serving.
(n.) Pertaining to servants, esp. domestic servants; servile; low; mean.
(n.) A domestic servant or retainer, esp. one of humble rank; one employed in low or servile offices.
(n.) A person of a servile character or disposition.
Example Sentences:
(1) Women seldom occupy higher positions in a [criminal] organisation, and are rather used for menial, but often dangerous tasks ,” it notes.
(2) One of the biggest losers are the estimated 12-20 million illegal immigrants living in the US, most of whom play an integral role in the economy, doing menial jobs that citizens do not want.
(3) Having failed to get into Rada, Wesker embarked on a series of menial jobs: bookseller's assistant, plumber's mate and, at the Bell hotel in Norwich, kitchen porter.
(4) The new movie marks a partial return to the thematic territory of Rosetta , which concerned a teenage girl scrabbling around for menial jobs.
(5) In the UK, the interrelated challenges we face include an ageing population; technological advances that wipe out whole occupations; global competition and the large-scale underemployment of individuals, mostly women, overqualified for the menial jobs they have struggled to acquire.
(6) Nonetheless, the workers' movement was once dedicated to the eventual abolition of all menial, tedious, grinding work.
(7) The system applies domain-specific knowledge to manage the menial details and automate most of the decision-making steps involved in the design process.
(8) • On placement, put your ego to one side and take on any task, however menial: it will open the door to new experiences.
(9) If they are poor, it wants them to be invisible, flitting uncomplainingly from one menial job to the next.
(10) The prosecution claimed that the man, who left home when he was 11 to take up a series of menial jobs in Delhi, was the most violent of the attackers of the girl last December.
(11) Like ads for other menial jobs, they use absurd and insulting hyperbole in inverse proportion to the quality of the position, as though seeing the word SUPERSTAR enough times will make you forget how boring the duties are.
(12) If that became true over the past 10 years, it was only in the "we are all middle class now" sense of New Labour – not in the sense of actually eliminating menial work, or the divide between workers and owners.
(13) There is also Hunt's plan to make all student nurses spend a year of their training doing the more menial tasks in healthcare usually done by healthcare assistants – feeding, washing and moving patients, for example.
(14) We suggest that prosperity which has led to use of foreign laborers in menial jobs has caused this slow down.
(15) The Home Office says the menial work is provided on a voluntary basis to meet their “recreational and intellectual” needs and provide “relief from boredom”.
(16) It’s about spotting that and thinking about how you can influence it.” That’s the dream Clara Summers (not her real name), 33, clings to as she contemplates quitting her job in events at a Copenhagen bar, where a “bro-centric” atmosphere means that, as the only woman in the management team, she is handed all the menial tasks.
(17) Menial tasks in South Africa are invariably performed by Africans.
(18) Professional politicians, and their intellectual menials, will no doubt blather on about “Islamic fundamentalism”, the “western alliance” and “full-spectrum response”.
(19) 15.5% were not in school and unemployed, and 28% worked at menial jobs.
(20) Smartphones at the ready: TechCrunch has given Alfred , an outsourcing app for your most menial tasks, its Disrupt Cup – an award that recognises the best new start-ups.
Understair
Definition:
(a.) Of or pertaining to the kitchen, or the servants' quarters; hence, subordinate; menial.
Example Sentences:
(1) Pointing to an understairs cupboard in the corridor, she says: "Sometimes I ask Ben to get something from the back, he goes in and then I shut him in!"