What's the difference between mire and quagmire?

Mire


Definition:

  • (n.) An ant.
  • (n.) Deep mud; wet, spongy earth.
  • (v. t.) To cause or permit to stick fast in mire; to plunge or fix in mud; as, to mire a horse or wagon.
  • (v. t.) To soil with mud or foul matter.
  • (v. i.) To stick in mire.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) For decades, resource extraction on First Nations land and chronically underfunded schools have left many of these communities mired in poverty, alcoholism and disease.
  • (2) Our computer-based corneal topography analysis system was used to study the keratoscope photographs (keratograms) from two patients with classic pellucid marginal degeneration and a third patient with no inferior corneal thinning, whose keratoscope mire pattern was suggestive of the condition.
  • (3) With an out-of-session Congress deadlocked over immigration reform and right-wing lawmakers hell-bent on “sealing the border”, the White House faces intense pressure to do something – anything – about immigration, after years of burying a civil rights crisis in a mire of political tone-deafness and jingoistic bombast.
  • (4) A leading thinktank has forecast that Britain will remain mired in recession this year, and slashed growth forecasts for almost all members of the G7 group of leading industrial nations.
  • (5) The European commission released a statement about the situation later on Wednesday, less than two weeks after agreeing a rescue deal for Greece that was meant to prevent Italy and Spain being dragged into the mire.
  • (6) The discovery of "serious failings" in the sale of these so-called interest rate swaps comes as the banking industry is mired in controversy about manipulating interest rates following the record-breaking £290m fine slapped on Barclays on Wednesday.
  • (7) Since the incumbent, Ilham Aliyev, inherited power from his late father 10 years ago, Azerbaijan has become mired in rampant corruption , and the ruling regime has grown ever more authoritarian and ruthless .
  • (8) The French president, François Hollande , will have 25 minutes on primetime television on Sunday evening to convince his nation that he will keep his election pledges and drag his country out of the economic mire.
  • (9) But I was wrong to peg Let’s Be Cops down in the mire with the Scary Movie franchise.
  • (10) Mired in a deepening recession, with the economy projected to shrink by at least 2.4% this year, Italy also posted more bad news, with retail sales figures for July showing a 3.2% fall on a year ago.
  • (11) Dismayingly, the elected government of the president, Ashraf Ghani, like that of Hamid Karzai before it, has proved incompetent, divided, and mired in corruption .
  • (12) Hunt also argued that the current "sink or swim system" in which free schools, academies and academy chains were managed by Whitehall, had left the school landscape mired in incoherence, confusion and lack of accountability.
  • (13) A government investigation into his death has become mired in controversy after a judge nominated to head the probe said he would not participate.
  • (14) The economy has been mired in recession for six consecutive quarters - the longest slump in history – but the CBI now expects output to grow by 1.2% in 2010 and by 2.5% in 2011.
  • (15) This is an attempt to increase choice and drive digital switchover, which is mired in difficulty but another key duty.
  • (16) Companies have cut staff and costs to the bone , but demand remains sluggish in the US, and Europe is still mired in a financial crisis of historic proportions.
  • (17) Her response on a Seattle cable channel to Barack Obama’s state of the nation address in January, in which she accused the president of betraying Americans mired in poverty , spread via the internet and reinforced her growing reputation among activists outside Seattle.
  • (18) The margin of victory was still a comfortable 95 runs, and the win lifts Warwicks well out of the relegation zone, while leaving Kent deeper in the mire.
  • (19) One small shareholder, who introduced himself as Captain Hawker, said BP had stepped into a “PR nightmare” by handing out such largesse when the rest of the country was mired in austerity.
  • (20) Last year 87% of the 900,000 migrants making the journey to Europe came through Greece but, following the European Union’s new deal with Turkey , smugglers’ gangs are already sizing up Libya – which is mired in the chaos of civil war – as an alternative route.

Quagmire


Definition:

  • (n.) Soft, wet, miry land, which shakes or yields under the feet.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) All these looked likely to be achieved in the final days of the talks, and still may be – if the hosts can pull the talks out of the quagmire on Saturday.
  • (2) Episodic changes in cognition unrelated to epilepsy or syncope remain a quagmire.
  • (3) Aimless wandering in the quagmire of imaging techniques is very expensive and nonproductive.
  • (4) The funding quagmire extends to Pakistan itself, where the US cables detail sharp criticism of the government's ambivalence towards funding of militant groups that enjoy covert military support.
  • (5) A Both the United States and the UK have consistently ruled this out, and it seems highly unlikely at present that either would risk a return to a high-casualty military quagmire from which they have only just extricated themselves.
  • (6) In a speech in Manchester, Trevor Phillips, the head of the Commission for Racial Equality, will warn against the country "sleep-walking" into a "New Orleans-style" quagmire of "fully fledged ghettoes".
  • (7) The economic quagmire has provided the perfect breeding ground for general merchandise discounters, who have expanded aggressively – more than filling the void created by the collapse of Woolworths in 2008.
  • (8) When American politicians consider solutions to the threat posed by Isis, they tend to favor abstractions over policy detail because, although Americans want to do more to root out Isis, we’re afraid of getting involved in another quagmire in the Middle East.
  • (9) Economic sanctions have combined with falling oil prices to deal a serious blow to the Russian economy in recent months, leading many to suspect that Putin might be looking for a way out of the east Ukraine quagmire.
  • (10) And Brennan knows that any questions left unanswered will only drag the department further into a quagmire.
  • (11) The British government’s appetite for being sucked back into the kind of tortuous negotiations and legal quagmire that lay behind the release of Shaker Aamer is likely to be limited.
  • (12) He was accused of being more interested in party politics than a way out of the quagmire.
  • (13) Asked if he needed to make a pragmatic deal with Assad in the face of the greater Isis threat he said: "In the past, simply saying, 'My enemy's enemy is my friend' has led to all sorts of moral quagmires and difficulties.
  • (14) Still, the early agreement on forests has boosted confidence in the UN process at a time when the main strand of talks on a global deal appear stuck in an 80-page long quagmire of a text.
  • (15) It has only provoked an insatiable demand from the public for more "free" services, with the result that the system has become a quagmire of cost overruns and unfulfilled and unrealizable promises.
  • (16) The perils of both objectives – a bloody quagmire – are the sources of Obama’s hesitation in Syria.
  • (17) Moscow remains wary of the Afghan quagmire, with memories still fresh of the disastrous 1979-89 war that cost the lives of 15,000 Russian soldiers and uncounted Afghan civilians, and ultimately contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
  • (18) The present debate on capital punishment cannot be detached from the “Kurdish question”, which is stuck in a quagmire.
  • (19) People have tried and tried for many years and it always seems to be a quagmire."
  • (20) deals with the quagmire that awaits people caught in the welfare system.

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