What's the difference between obsequious and subservient?

Obsequious


Definition:

  • (a.) Promptly obedient, or submissive, to the will of another; compliant; yielding to the desires of another; devoted.
  • (a.) Servilely or meanly attentive; compliant to excess; cringing; fawning; as, obsequious flatterer, parasite.
  • (a.) Of or pertaining to obsequies; funereal.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Labour too had "sort of fallen to their knees obsequiously towards very powerful vested interests in the media", he said.
  • (2) Families of China's 'disappeared' say country is a place of fear and panic Read more “It is so obsequious, it is just nauseating,” said Howie.
  • (3) This week I saw a hilarious clip of Trump beckoning Farage out of a crowd – a bit like Courteney Cox in the Dancing in the Dark video – and Farage telling him obsequiously he was “handing over the mantle”.
  • (4) In a piece for Salon , Greenwald said the blog’s favorable – “obsequious” was the word he used – coverage of justices was a way for Goldstein to curry favor for when he would argue before the court.
  • (5) They're still queuing up to take a bow, albeit less obsequiously than before.
  • (6) After King Phil repaid Labour for its obsequiousness by publicly backing the Tories in 2010, the new PM asked him to review government spending and procurement.
  • (7) Not for him the tiny calibrations of the text or the obsequious notes to his masters.
  • (8) There are people who have been absolute shits for the last 20 years who have suddenly become embarrassingly friendly and obsequious.
  • (9) And in the middle of it were the two Matthews, obsequiously yucking it up like a grotesque Fluck and Law parody of the coddled one-percent.
  • (10) The minister’s article reads like an obsequious sales pitch, but in that sense it is fairly consistent with the UK government’s approach to the Gulf states.
  • (11) Observing this process through the prism of private equity, there is a certain obsequiousness on behalf of politicians behind closed doors.
  • (12) First, nobly casting aside obsequious talk of titles following his recent appointment as president of the Queen's Bench Division, Leveson willingly confirmed that he was his old self: "I was always Brian Leveson."
  • (13) For a decade Britain has been obsequious towards China .
  • (14) Thus the same administration that resisted judicial disclosure pursuant to transparency laws leaked bits and pieces about the mission (always favorable to the president) to their favorite media message-carriers ; secretly met with and shoveled information to big Hollywood filmmakers planning a pre-election release of a film about the Bin Laden raid (now pushed back until December in the wake of the ensuing controversy, though the already-released film trailer – see below – will soon be inundating the nation); and then sat down with one of America's most obsequious, military-revering news anchors for an hour-long prime-time special that spoke of the raid with predictable awe but asked none of the hard questions about these lingering issues.
  • (15) Obsequiousness tends not to make good pictures of politicians – unless you happen to be Thomas Gainsborough or George Romney – and in a sense photographers are that unusual thing for them, a person just getting on with doing their job just as they might with anybody else.
  • (16) The all-too-familiar axis that has enabled massive civil liberties assaults by the Obama administration - blindly partisan progressive media outlets and particularly obsequious self-styled neutral journalists - instantly sprung into action here and wasted no time jumping to the defense of the US government.
  • (17) Most people, let alone journalists, would be far too embarrassed to admit they harbor such subservient, obsequious sentiments.
  • (18) That same article quoted the supremely obsequious former Obama adviser Harold Koh as hailing torture advocate and serial deceiver John Brennan as "a person of genuine moral rectitude" who ensures that the "kill list" is accompanied by moral struggle: "It's as though you had a priest with extremely strong moral values who was suddenly charged with leading a war," Koh said.
  • (19) Here's the White House list of who's meeting with the president: • Ajay Banga, MasterCard • Steve Bennett, Symantec • Wes Bush, Northrop Grumman • Marillyn Hewson, Lockheed Martin • Renee James, Intel • Brian Moynihan, Bank of America • Joe Rigby, Pepco Holdings • Charlie Scharf, Visa 3.31pm GMT With exceptions , congressional interrogation of intelligence officials in hearings since the Snowden revelations in June has been obsequious conspiratorial deeply collegial .
  • (20) Tyranny becomes docile and subservient, and a soft totalitarianism prevails, as obsequious as a wine waiter.

Subservient


Definition:

  • (a.) Fitted or disposed to subserve; useful in an inferior capacity; serving to promote some end; subordinate; hence, servile, truckling.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The classic Jedi response to subservience can be seen in the contrast between Luke’s first meeting with C-3PO – “I see, Sir”; “You can call me Luke”; “I see, Sir Luke,”; “No, just Luke” – and Qui-Gon Jinn meeting Jar Jar Binks: “Mesa your humble servant”; “That won’t be necessary”.
  • (2) It was concluded that meal-associated rhythms are associated with an endogenous oscillator distinct from the SCN and that it may not entirely subservient to the SCN-based oscillator in intact rats.
  • (3) With just three days in which to form a government that could fill the power vacuum that has emerged in Athens, Tsipras said he would begin by approaching other leftwing forces in an attempt to "end the agreements of subservience".
  • (4) The supreme leader wants a subservient and disciplined sidekick but he also needs a president to solve some very delicate problems.
  • (5) Everything else is subservient to that.” Rather grandly, he says he will have nothing to do with either of them.
  • (6) Choe also accused the European Union and Japan, the resolution’s co-sponsors, of “subservience and sycophancy” to the United States, and he promised “unpredictable and serious consequences” if the resolution went forward.
  • (7) It may be entirely unsurprising in Whitehall that our subservience has been institutionalised in this way, but everyone else is entitled to ask whether that makes it healthy or right.
  • (8) While it is fashionable to charge Mugabe with destroying Zimbabwe in its prime, little regard is given to the fact that the average African country has been granted nominal political independence amid economic subservience.
  • (9) There was a particular teacher who was bent on casting people of colour in very subservient roles.
  • (10) Race, gender, and socioeconomic status place poor women of color in triple jeopardy for subservience.
  • (11) It was evidence of the establishment’s “extraordinary subservience” to foreign royals, he added.
  • (12) During the first week or two of his leadership he will be faced with the allegation – promoted by cynical Tory newspapers and garrulous Labour ancients – that he wants to take Labour back to the days of wholesale public ownership and subservience to the trade unions.
  • (13) In 50 years, will a paper be uncovered detailing a shady scheme to keep British subjects subservient with cakes and vintage-style pluck?
  • (14) Ahmed Wali Karzai , who was gunned down in his home in Kandahar by a bodyguard, was in many ways the personification of modern-day Afghanistan – corrupt, treacherous, lawless, paradoxical, subservient and charming.
  • (15) Evidence is discussed to show that so-called L- and P-type dyslexia result from deviations in the development of hemispheric subservience in learning to read.
  • (16) Bluntly, one race is cast in a supporting and therefore subservient role to the other, and this is oppressive in a way that all the representation in the world couldn’t address.
  • (17) A strike, even if it was supported by only a small number of junior doctors, would – somewhat paradoxically – run the risk of helping the government in its determination to replace an independent medical profession with a subservient workforce of doctors who are only motivated by financial self-interest, and managed by economically efficient managers.
  • (18) Health programs can also change the attitudes of men toward women, including attitudes that are detrimental to women's health such as the belief that women are weak and that good women are quiet, subservient, and bear many children.
  • (19) "There are many different factions here, and all are cooperating now but we fear that they [Isis] will impose there control, and they start treating everyone as subservient to them," he said.
  • (20) She flamboyantly overcame the patriarchal restrictions of Arab society where women are traditionally subservient to their husbands, by taking an equal fighting role with men, by getting divorced and remarried, having children in her late 30s, and rejecting vanity by having her face reconstructed for her cause.