What's the difference between paltry and trashy?

Paltry


Definition:

  • (superl.) Mean; vile; worthless; despicable; contemptible; pitiful; trifling; as, a paltry excuse; paltry gold.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) She says that the spread of insecure, short-term contracts and part-time work, together with benefits cuts and paltry wage growth, have meant that many people in work are struggling to make ends meet.
  • (2) Let’s leave that discussion to another day, but imagine a combination of the two – sort of Transformers meets Ex Machina – in which a race of giant sexy robots battles it out with another race of really mean giant sexy robots while paltry human beings look on in awe, and teenage boys (and girls) experience incredibly conflicting and disturbing sensual awakenings in the front row of the Beckenham Odeon.
  • (3) Only Orange's pay monthly deals come with Wi-Fi access and they only include a paltry 750MB of Wi-Fi browsing – again through BT Openzone's network of hotspots.
  • (4) In 2010 Bedder 6 paid out total dividends of £1.68m — which saw Clarkson pocket a comparatively paltry £850,000 when his share is calculated and his annual service payment is added in — meaning his income from Bedder 6 has almost tripled year on year.
  • (5) A paltry 50g of brown rice takes up over a third of your daily calorie count.
  • (6) By his own lofty standards Cavendish's return of two stage wins from this year's Tour has been paltry and myriad signs of hitherto unseen fallibility, a team that is clearly not good enough to work in his service and suggestions that his star is on the wane will leave him with much to ponder.
  • (7) If the recession results in interest rates remaining low for years, as many in the City are now predicting, then annuity rates will also remain at paltry levels.
  • (8) Frontex’s annual budget is a paltry €90m (£65m).
  • (9) Russia and China , meanwhile, have contributed a paltry $17.8 million and $1.2 million, respectively.
  • (10) It is the result of rejecting the world of public disengagement and laissez faire that delivered one paltry gold medal in Atlanta just 16 years ago.
  • (11) The value has now decreased slightly and their share probably sits at a paltry $10m.
  • (12) In 1959, US intelligence estimates suggested that the USSR would be in possession of between 1,000 and 1,500 nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) compared to America’s paltry 100.
  • (13) Co-operative customer #3 is making do with a paltry state pension, subsidising the cost of groceries with a fortnightly package from the local food bank and unable to afford energy bills.
  • (14) The food industry spends over £1bn a year on marketing in the UK, compared with the paltry £14m spent on the government's anti-obesity campaign.
  • (15) The Italians are earning paltry returns from knocking out white goods in competition with the Chinese and Koreans.
  • (16) A paltry £1,000 for each marginal Labour candidate hardly buys a poster site.
  • (17) The sums are so paltry that the animus seems deliberate.
  • (18) As he itemises the contents of the pawnbroker's shop ("a few old China cups; some modern vases, adorned with paltry paintings of three Spanish cavaliers playing three Spanish guitars; or a party of boors carousing: each boor with one leg painfully elevated in the air by way of expressing his perfect freedom and gaiety …") you sense that Dickens barely knows how to stop.
  • (19) Yet he went on to pretend a paltry array of stimuli will fix the problem: he cannot possibly believe that loose change from the petty cash will arrest the plunge in employment and growth.
  • (20) Growth for the UK in 2012 will be a paltry 0.6%, the IMF says.

Trashy


Definition:

  • (superl.) Like trash; containing much trash; waste; rejected; worthless; useless; as, a trashy novel.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) But I think this isn’t a problem only kids face – we’ve become a country of trashy readers.
  • (2) Prince's art appears to celebrate trashiness and low-rent style.
  • (3) His group of bourgeois friends, aged over 60, (some of whom are inspired by real writers, intellectuals and artists), resist by attending trashy parties; it's a generation incapable of growing up.
  • (4) Could Fifty Shades of Grey, with a smart female director at the helm, usher in a new era of movies for lusty, grown-up women, even if its trashy reputation and wayward use of cable ties might not seem to be the fertile ground from which this might spring?
  • (5) Contributors are awarded badges – "LOL", "Trashy", "Fail" – if their article inspires a certain number of responses.
  • (6) The letter to Carusone hints at Trump's litigious past, urging him to "look no further than former Miss Pennsylvania Sheena Monnin, who just last week found herself on the wrong side of a $5m judgment in favour of Mr Trump after falsely stating in the press that the Trump-owned Miss USA pageant was both "fixed" and "trashy".
  • (7) She has continued to work since then, though, but mostly small parts in TV shows and trashy horror films.
  • (8) That they are crass, brash and trashy goes without saying.
  • (9) There's something of the old-fashioned showman about Hytner: highbrow and lowbrow isn't a distinction he values (he claims to enjoy Diana Krall as much as Haydn, and admits a secret affection for trashy pop).
  • (10) He made every trashy costume seem as natural as a good suit and, for all his life, he seemed carried forward by the odd mixture of yearning and fatalism that prompted Humbert Humbert.
  • (11) Along that way, so much of her early trashiness was forgiven by the public so that at her death, at last – for hospital was one of her long-running roles or duties – there is much grief and sorrow for her.
  • (12) Considering illustrations to be trashy, he set a simple thee-part grid, with colour coded bands – orange for fiction, green for crime, blue for biographies and pink for travel and adventure – while text was set in crisp Gill Sans and strictly marshalled into the centre.
  • (13) Laurie Penny's wonderful, spirited defence of the novel certainly found aspects to like "because there were, amongst some terrifically trashy bits of girly romance and some eye-watering blow-job scenarios, a few quite good, quite detailed descriptions of fucking written from the point of view of a woman who seemed to be really enjoying herself".
  • (14) I can give anyone a hard time.” She once lectured Kentucky senator and 2016 candidate Rand Paul over his penchant for arguing with female reporters, and memorably asked another White House hopeful, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, to clarify why he thought it was trashy for women to swear in public.
  • (15) This seems a pretty improbable form of entertainment for the most controversial woman in the history of rock, but she claims to be a big fan of trashy British TV, particularly if it involves Katie Price, with whom Love seems slightly obsessed: she keeps sending Price Tweets; alas, to no response.
  • (16) I think a lot of people have assumed that the SF was the trashy but high-selling stuff I had to churn out in order to keep a roof over my head while I wrote the important, serious, non-genre literary novels.
  • (17) Taken as a whole, the work of Noble and Webster reveals a fascination for trashy sex and sentimentalised love, often mediated through fly-by-night pop culture, and an equal obsession with cycles of decay and decomposition.
  • (18) The after-hours counterpart to G-A-Y (G-A-Y Late) has quickly replaced the Joiners Arms as London’s trashy gay bar of choice, where everyone is invited.
  • (19) It ranges from the tragic (Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar ) to the quasi-trashy (Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything ) to the comic (Ruth McKenney's delightful but, sadly, half-forgotten My Sister Eileen ) to the bohemian (Mary McCarthy's The Company She Keeps ).
  • (20) "The biggest misconception people have is that quality is all that matters," Peretti says, in an admission likely to give further ammunition to those who think the site is trashy and downmarket.