What's the difference between obsequious and sycophantic?

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.

Sycophantic


Definition:

  • (a.) Alt. of Sycophantical

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Around the world millions would relish seeing their unaccountable, insulated leaders exposed to something harsher than a sycophantic press conference.
  • (2) In a Telegraph blog, published this evening, the former Tory cabinet minister deploys his trademark bluntness to warn that it is "imperative for the Tories is to establish that Mr Clegg is a pro-immigration sycophantic Europhile with no policy whatsoever, beyond defence cuts, to reduce the crippling burden of the national debt".
  • (3) People may heap sycophantic praise on you now, but "the poet remembers", poeta pamieta.
  • (4) As most establishment media figures do when quivering in the presence of national security state officials, the supremely sycophantic TV host Bob Schieffer treated Hayden like a visiting dignitary in his living room and avoided a single hard question.
  • (5) 20 years ago this prize would have been sycophantic but maybe more justified.
  • (6) Yeah … so he comes in and we’re all standing there [gesturing sycophantic applause] and he’s: ‘I’ve got you where I want you.’ Has it been hard work being Roy Keane ?
  • (7) And in only a handful of scenes he brought to ripe, repugnant life a sycophantic functionary in the Coen brothers' caper The Big Lebowski (1998).
  • (8) Twenty years ago this prize would have been sycophantic but maybe more justified.
  • (9) A lazily sycophantic Tory commentariat will usually swallow most of what their leaders say, regardless of what they do.
  • (10) So he comes in and we’re all standing there [gesturing sycophantic applause] and he’s: ‘I’ve got you where I want you.’” The former United captain also reflected on how Ferguson had withdrawn his loan players from Preston North End after his son, Darren, had been sacked as their manager – and how Stoke City, then managed by Pulis, had followed suit.
  • (11) I was banned from the party for standing as an independent candidate in the last general election, so I observe impartially – believing party politics to be a stagnating system, a weirdo hobby whose significance is talked up by sycophantic media.
  • (12) Legend has it that during a sycophantic Q&A session, the young Deng broke ranks and put a critical question to one of the most successful businessmen in the world: "Why is your business strategy in China so bad?"
  • (13) Members of Allende's presidential staff would remember the pre-coup Pinochet as a bluff and somewhat sycophantic officer - "the guy we would call if we needed a jeep," said one.
  • (14) Certainly he enjoys more influence than any other Egyptian and has a large, sycophantic following .
  • (15) It describes a Muslim fraternity within the governing party and an "iron ring of sycophantic but contemptuous advisers".
  • (16) Her love for Charles, and his for her, has a purity and nobility that has shone through the 35 years I have been writing sycophantic books and articles about the royal family.
  • (17) "Bill [Nicholson, the Tottenham manager] had sent our trainer Cecil Poynton over to haul us out of the pub," remembered Jimmy Greaves of his first Spurs Christmas party, possibly to a background of feeble, sycophantic laughter from Ian St John.
  • (18) Anyone who is actually "anti-politics" is indeed political, but sees this establishment as sycophantic, self-serving and only able to clone itself.
  • (19) Further comment on how he finds it should have been added parenthetically (and rather sycophantically), and not in the context of added emphasis to his regional peculiarity” – Brett Crowley.
  • (20) Willie Rennie, the Scottish party leader, said: "The blatant sycophantic behaviour laid out for all to see should make the first minister squirm.