What's the difference between nostalgia and sentimentality?

Nostalgia


Definition:

  • (n.) Homesickness; esp., a severe and sometimes fatal form of melancholia, due to homesickness.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Ultimately, the judgments combine to make a particularly peculiar melange: among the plaintiffs there is a mix of economic pessimism and insecure nationalism with a shot of nostalgia for the Deutschmark.
  • (2) It's also, clearly, the beginning of an annual TV tradition, a comforting pool of lamplit nostalgia amid all the sequins and celebrity hoo-hah, with Geoffrey Palmer flapping his jowls exasperatedly as he realises he's packed the wrong rectal tube.
  • (3) As I enjoy my individual freedom in South Korea, I don’t really have any nostalgia for North Korea.
  • (4) Breathes has been smoking cannabis for more than half his life, but he has no nostalgia for the old days, no regrets about the industry becoming commercialised.
  • (5) Duran Duran, Phil Collins and the Human League helped Absolute Radio top 4 million listeners across its seven-strong network for the first time, powered by a strong performance by nostalgia station Absolute 80s.
  • (6) She has also impressed the rank and file with her tough talking to the Police Federation, vowing to break its power and bringing to an end its closed-shop practices, sending many Tories of a certain age into ecstasies of Thatcherite nostalgia.
  • (7) In Ethiopia the word for nostalgia is tizita , Wildschut points out, which is also the word for a style of music.
  • (8) As Trump’s dystopia becomes a reality, the nostalgia for his calm, measured and consensual solutions has begun early.
  • (9) 12.21pm BST A-level results always seem to provoke outpourings of nostalgia.
  • (10) Yet, there is no doubt that All Star has been targeted for its specific qualities – the main ones being its feelgood nostalgia value and a laughably exuberant pop-punk style that feels totally earnest.
  • (11) Sentamu came here as a refugee, an asylum seeker, and has a real passion for the underdog, yet in some ways his dream of Britain is closer to the back-to-the-50s nostalgia of Ukip (although not their policies) than to the modern Labour party.
  • (12) The obsession of "For Fatherland and Freedom" to pay public homage to the Latvian-SS Legion in contradiction to all historical logic and sensitivity to Nazi crimes is not a product of ostensibly harmless nostalgia as Pickles would have us believe, but part of a rather insidious plan to gain recognition for a perversely distorted version of European history which will officially equate Communism with Nazism.
  • (13) The anxieties fuelling France’s populism echo those of Geert Wilders and Donald Trump supporters, including “democratic fatigue” and nostalgia for how life supposedly once was.
  • (14) He concludes: "If journalists, for reasons of nostalgia, inertia, confusion or misplaced loyalty, choose to keep swimming with the privacy intruders, they may well drown with them."
  • (15) Nostalgia has had its niche in pop ever since 70s stars such as Showaddywaddy and the late Les Gray of Mud cheerfully recycled the rhythms and quiffs of the 50s.
  • (16) Berman remarked in 2000 that "I confess (and it isn't hard to detect), I am guilty of nostalgia for the 60s, days of my youth."
  • (17) Some express nostalgia for the manicured city centre of the old days.
  • (18) Nostalgia was the soldiers’ malady – a state of mind that made life in the here and now a debilitating process of yearning for that which had been lost: rose-tinted peace, happiness, loved ones.
  • (19) In part, it began as a bit of nostalgia for him – "I did it every Friday night when I was at college.
  • (20) Surely any warm glow we might feel about HMV nostalgia deserves dousing with the news that gift vouchers some bought at the shop over Christmas are now invalid .

Sentimentality


Definition:

  • (n.) The quality or state of being sentimental.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) "Indeed, there was a marked drop in sentiment in Germany , indicating that it is increasingly being affected by the problems elsewhere in the eurozone."
  • (2) Giving voice to that sentiment the mass-selling daily newspaper Ta Nea dedicated its front-page editorial to what it hoped would soon be the group's demise, describing Alexopoulos' desertion as a "positive development".
  • (3) The characteristic mental disturbance includes damage to memory and sentiment, a change in personality, and lowering in spontaneity, but calculation ability and orientation are comparatively preserved.
  • (4) The only Spanish voice heard in Catalonia is that of the Madrid government, which seems oblivious to the implications of the groundswell of pro-independence sentiment, much as at Westminster politicians missed the shift in Scottish opinion until just before the referendum.
  • (5) We still have at our disposal the rational interpretive skills that are the legacy of humanistic education, not as a sentimental piety enjoining us to return to traditional values or the classics but as the active practice of worldly secular rational discourse.
  • (6) One that sentimentality is obsessed by while funds are disproportionately siphoned away from the other 20,933 species facing extinction .
  • (7) The report recommended that governments and international agencies need to counter the anti-vaccination sentiment identified on social media with strong messaging.
  • (8) For some, Aussie still simply means “white”, a sentiment that itself obscures the mostly forgotten English bigotry against the Irish, Australia’s first other.
  • (9) Although Barcelona still needed another, Álvaro Morata’s goal increasing the nerves, and although the Croat’s goal would not prove the winner, the sentiment will be similar in Catalonia now too.
  • (10) Her sentiments echo those of one PKK commander, who says she was not surprised about the sudden breakdown of the peace process.
  • (11) Other controversial voices were Barry Norman, who wondered if Williams’s battles with mental health led him to take on sentimental film projects, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, whose tweet reading “Genie, you’re free” was seen as glorifying suicide .
  • (12) Eduardo Gorab, a property economist at Capital Economics, said: “Clearly, the uncertainty kicked up by the referendum’s result has had an adverse impact on sentiment, which has been driving outflows over the last week or two.
  • (13) To suggest that people who are concerned about the use of a power of this sort against journalists are condoning terrorism, which seems to be the implication of that remark, is an extremely ugly and unhelpful sentiment.
  • (14) Such sentiments are not uncommon in job agencies, particularly those that specialise in factory and food work, where labour demand is variable and geographically shifting, and conditions often arduous.
  • (15) They must have regard to common moral sentiments, and to what will be morally acceptable in the country as a whole (though they can never hope for total agreement with their conclusions).
  • (16) Its possible marriage to the Sheffield city region is overwhelmingly rooted in perceived economic advantage rather than in history or public sentiment.
  • (17) However, Reinfeldt's majority was undermined by the far right, who have sought to harness anti-immigrant sentiment in a country where one in seven residents is foreign-born.
  • (18) Among groups or organizations, it is unusual for changes in sentiment to precede action or organizational rearrangements.
  • (19) The sentiment is shared by Ed Woodward, the executive vice-chairman, who had not envisaged quite how poorly United would fare.
  • (20) The most important polling question right now is ‘Would you consider voting for Candidate X?’ More than 80% of the GOP electorate would consider voting for Rubio – more than any other candidate.” The rise of outsiders such as Trump, neurosurgeon Ben Carson and businesswoman Carly Fiorina, Luntz added, “is a gut emotional reaction by Republicans to Obama, Clinton and even the Republican Congress.” In a nod to the current “anyone-but-DC” sentiment among primary voters, Rubio has recently made subtle changes to his usual stump speech by casting himself as both an underdog and an outsider.