What's the difference between obsequious and unctuous?

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.

Unctuous


Definition:

  • (a.) Of the nature or quality of an unguent or ointment; fatty; oily; greasy.
  • (a.) Having a smooth, greasy feel, as certain minerals.
  • (a.) Bland; suave; also, tender; fervid; as, an unctuous speech; sometimes, insincerely suave or fervid.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Early opportunities to indulge his skill for making unctuousness compelling came in the roles of a school snitch in the Al Pacino vehicle Scent of a Woman (1992), for which Hoffman auditioned five times.
  • (2) Trump, when asked last December which president he most admires, did not pay the usual unctuous tribute to Lincoln, Kennedy or Reagan, but said that his role model was James Marshall.
  • (3) Already irritated with Speaker John Bercow for being long-winded, unctuous and perceptibly anti-Conservative in the House of Commons, the idea that his Labour-supporting wife would go on the programme's Channel 5 reincarnation had been a red rag to the proverbial.
  • (4) Disease, birth-defects and chronic illnesses are all part and parcel of an unregulated industry that operates outside the range of global media but with the full complicity of the Nigerian government that wants nothing whatsoever to upset its unctuous cash-cow.
  • (5) That your jaw is wired open, and you're being spoonfed thick, unctuous vomit from a large tureen forged from glimmering, gilded rubbish.
  • (6) These things are driven by rolling, unctuous television telling people a great event is unfolding, focusing on the few hysterics in tears and not the many who come to feel their pain.
  • (7) Just as he had (arguably) revolutionised TV satire, making it threatening to, rather than complicit with, the establishment, here he was changing the nature of the TV interview: unctuous deference was out; aggression and scepticism were in.
  • (8) But there's no doubt who left amid the biggest slurp of unctuous adulation.
  • (9) Listening to the voluptuous precision with which he articulated his dream of feasting "on the swelling, unctuous paps of a fat, pregnant sow", it was good to be reminded of the matchless clarity of the Richardson voice which remains one of the great treasures of my theatre-going lifetime.
  • (10) Despite the ongoing threat to national sanity posed by The X Factor, such pop is no longer the embarrassing province of the unctuous boyband, or pitched strictly at the tweenage market.
  • (11) This dish is the opposite of all those things: sinfully rich, full of butter, served with unctuous roasting juices on top.
  • (12) So, the trick is either to catch the meat before the muscle cells burst, or leave it in the oven for ages until everything reaches an unctuous softness.
  • (13) History’s first overtly gay Disney character, it turns out, is LeFou, unctuous manservant to preening, hyper-macho villain Gaston – an underling who, in Condon’s words, “on one day wants to be Gaston and on another day wants to kiss Gaston”.
  • (14) This is said often, even in this unctuous week - and yet still it does not permeate.
  • (15) Pointlessly suffixed to a retweet to indicate earnest accord, "<THIS" is really nothing but an unctuous tagnut.
  • (16) The pintxos are chalked up on a board and cooked to order: an unctuous risotto of mushrooms and idiazabal (a Basque cheese), garlic soup with pig's ear, braised veal cheeks in wine or a bacalao (salt cod) taco.
  • (17) But the haphazard canals criss-crossing it were still full of thick, unctuous water with a rainbow film on top, and white paint on the birch tree trunks could not cover the black trace of oil, Greenpeace says.
  • (18) We may be sure that the MP for Clacton has never trimmed his views for political advantage; nor has he begun a question with the unctuous phrase “May I congratulate my right honourable friend…” I know from experience that the role of an independent MP comes with its disadvantages.
  • (19) The always-packed tapas bar Casa Revuelta dishes up the city’s pre-eminent pinchos de bacalao – piping-hot, fist-size nuggets of flaky, unctuous cod (€2.80).
  • (20) Despite unctuous protests about good taste, there is an audience for this fight, a considerably bigger one than there had been before they came to blows in front of the cameras and some distance from a referee.