What's the difference between meretricious and merit?

Meretricious


Definition:

  • (a.) Of or pertaining to prostitutes; having to do with harlots; lustful; as, meretricious traffic.
  • (a.) Resembling the arts of a harlot; alluring by false show; gaudily and deceitfully ornamental; tawdry; as, meretricious dress or ornaments.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) It was the hangover of a meretricious general election.
  • (2) Hugh Trevor-Roper denounced it as this "meretricious, misleading work".
  • (3) To pretend otherwise is self-indulgent and meretricious.
  • (4) The campaign against next week's election of police commissioners is meretricious.
  • (5) "There is now a disproportionate amount of meretricious material aimed at appealing to public prurience, most of which revolves around the philandering of celebrities," he argues.
  • (6) Of course, even thinking in these crude competitive "scoresheet" terms is a very un-Serious thing to be doing, and the admirers of 12 Years a Slave may have a sinking feeling that it will not be properly rewarded in the tinselly, meretricious, un-Serious Oscar world.
  • (7) There is now a disproportionate amount of meretricious material aimed at appealing to public prurience, most of which revolves around the philandering of celebrities.
  • (8) Almost like the protagonist of a Victorian novel, Sharif was overtaken by his own success, to the extent that in order to service the debts incurred by gambling and a playboy lifestyle, he was thrown back on accepting any work that came his way, and entered a downward spiral into trivial and meretricious movies.
  • (9) Churchill's grandson, the Conservative MP Winston Churchill , wrote to Armstong worried that "my grandfather's wartime diary appears to have fallen into the hands of this meretricious historian, David Irving."
  • (10) Novels that sparkled in the summer sun will seem flashy and meretricious in the sober light of autumn.

Merit


Definition:

  • (n.) The quality or state of deserving well or ill; desert.
  • (n.) Esp. in a good sense: The quality or state of deserving well; worth; excellence.
  • (n.) Reward deserved; any mark or token of excellence or approbation; as, his teacher gave him ten merits.
  • (n.) To earn by service or performance; to have a right to claim as reward; to deserve; sometimes, to deserve in a bad sense; as, to merit punishment.
  • (n.) To reward.
  • (v. i.) To acquire desert; to gain value; to receive benefit; to profit.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) after operation for hip fracture, and merits assessment in other high-risk groups of patients.
  • (2) Originally from Pyongyang, the tour guide explains that a “merited artist” from Mansudae, North Korea’s biggest art studio in Pyongyang, was responsible for the main piece, but that it took 63 artists almost two years to complete.
  • (3) The concept of almost total breast biopsy has great merit in the discovery of occult carcinoma.
  • (4) A new figure of merit, the limit of identification, is introduced.
  • (5) An untiring advocate of the joys and merits of his adopted home county, Bradbury figured Norfolk as a place of writing parsons, farmer-writers and sensitive poets: John Skelton, Rider Haggard, John Middleton Murry, William Cowper, George MacBeth, George Szirtes.
  • (6) The results of this study, combined with those of previous studies, suggest that factor VII may be a useful additional marker of the risk for ischemic heart disease and merits further investigation.
  • (7) Patients with normal blood lipid livel merit special attention.
  • (8) Response to norepinephrine was 15, 20, 18, and 15% greater in high genetic than low genetic merit heifers and response to epinephrine was 12, 20, 14, and 50% greater in high genetic than low genetic merit heifers at 30, 60, 180, and 349 d postpartum.
  • (9) Since no evaluation of the relative merits of electro and chemical cautery has been reported, a prospective randomized study was conducted to assess the effectiveness of electro-cautery and cautery with silver nitrate.
  • (10) The finding is at variance with others that ascribe haemostatic changes observed to increased oestrogen content in a given pill formulation and so merits confirmation in a larger study.
  • (11) The surest way for either side to capture the mood of a cash-strapped country would be to give ground on those of their demands which have least merit.
  • (12) Frequency of sensitivity to foods, preservatives, colouring agents, medical substances, principally shown by provocation tests (the latter present a considerable interest, and merit frequent use); importance of bacterian, mycotic, parasitic origins; little importance of atopy; frequency of minor psychogenic disorders.
  • (13) The merits of formaldehyde, formaldehyde-glutaraldehyde combinations, and glutaraldehyde in phosphate buffers have been compared as fixatives that will give easy and satisfactory preservation of tissues for routine automated histologic processing and yet keep them suitable for electron microscopical studies after prolonged storage at room temperature.
  • (14) In the late post-operative period these patients developed complications which merited a surgical reintervention.
  • (15) Each of the five hospitals denied the doctors privileges without reaching the merits of the doctors' qualifications.
  • (16) However, submucosal resection of the septum is a rapid, but traumatic surgical method, which has its merits in duration and tradition.
  • (17) To assess quantitatively the merits of internal standardization, an amino acid mixture of known composition has been analyzed by conventional automated amino acid analysis before and after being subjected to total acid hydrolysis.
  • (18) Uefa has said it is open to proposals about the future of the competition, amid disquiet from clubs outside England about the spending power of Premier League clubs in the wake of their £8.3bn TV deal, but is expected to strongly resist any move to propose qualification should be on anything other than merit.
  • (19) Assumptions, bases for choice, and relative merits of these two modeling strategies are discussed.
  • (20) The increased frequency during the initial stage of the endoscopy, which may assume an already dangerous dimension for patients with coronary heart disease, merits particular attention.