What's the difference between peevish and pugnacious?

Peevish


Definition:

  • (a.) Habitually fretful; easily vexed or fretted; hard to please; apt to complain; querulous; petulant.
  • (a.) Expressing fretfulness and discontent, or unjustifiable dissatisfaction; as, a peevish answer.
  • (a.) Silly; childish; trifling.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) She says it began as a "defence mechanism" – "it gets you out of so many sticky situations" – but it has now become the means by which Delevingne communicates her sense of fun, in a world where most models seem to adopt a bored, peevish expression of someone queuing to return a faulty toaster in Argos.
  • (2) he says, but his laughter sounds more peevish than amused.
  • (3) By the end of the episode, a secret letter from Matthew granting his share of the estate to Mary – passing over George, his son – has turned up; Lord Grantham has bravely acceded to a partnership with his most peevish daughter; Lady Cora has found a new maid and Carson has come to terms with his past.
  • (4) One or two peevish voices thought Imlah too clever, too dustily "Oxonian", failing to see how mordantly modern many of the fables and instances in Birthmarks are, within their formal virtuosity and confidently literary bearing.
  • (5) When judges in New Jersey made it the fourteenth state (and third most populous, after California and New York) to join the club, the good people of cable news spent almost no time talking about the men and women getting married – and much more talking about Chris Christie, the peevish governor who dropped his appeal .
  • (6) That’s the peevish cry of our toddler culture | Marina Hyde Read more It was a privileged, cushioned move, smoothed by the presence of my mother, who waited a few months for me to settle down.
  • (7) From his tobacco-fugged study in Croisset, the Normandy hamlet where he lived with his mother and niece, Flaubert created an autonomous parallel universe: fiction as refuge from an outside world full of pain, peevishness and bourgeois vulgarity.
  • (8) Then he reversed the usual procedure and moved us greatly in the early scenes, where Lear so often only shows for a peevish tyrant.
  • (9) That’s the peevish cry of our toddler culture | Marina Hyde Read more The former Everton, Spurs and Barcelona striker has continued to speak his mind on Twitter despite the polarised reaction.
  • (10) This peevish remark, however, came from an unusual source.
  • (11) One is tempted to focus on her peculiarly peevish demeanor, a Grinchy soft-talking that sounds, even at the start of speeches, like she’s already had.
  • (12) When he's not pebbledashing the screen with peevish vowels the duke – AKA John Spencer-Churchill, AKA, bewilderingly, "Sunny" – spends his time power-walking along staggeringly ornate corridors, a maddeningly elusive blur of industry and corduroy.
  • (13) As he remarks peevishly to his wife when she shakes him out of yet another reverie: "Does it ever occur to you that I am sometimes thinking?"
  • (14) I smell with my little nose peevish self-doubting straights: were same-sex couples considered fine until they started getting good and winning trophies?
  • (15) But I am tired beyond belief of the peevish and western-centric commonplace that Ai is, somehow, both a heroic activist and a mediocre artist.
  • (16) It seems there is no one in Number 10 willing or able to tell her that she often comes across as arrogant and complacent, another difference from Corbyn, whose advisers have successfully convinced him to hide his peevish irritation with impudent journalists.
  • (17) Hubristic, peevish, and not a little paranoid, only he has the power to reverse this.
  • (18) Amarkhil himself was allegedly captured in some of the conversations played to journalists, asking a contact to "bring the sheep, stuffed properly", but also complaining peevishly about how little attention Ghani was giving him.
  • (19) We’ve got some good friends who are gay and they should have the right to be married.” A lone protester is sitting outside with police, peevish and aggrieved: “They grabbed me and pushed me out.

Pugnacious


Definition:

  • (a.) Disposed to fight; inclined to fighting; quarrelsome; fighting.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) He even has a soft spot for the Cockney Rejects, pugnacious purveyors of football singalongs.
  • (2) He caught sight of Marine Le Pen on a TV politics show in 2007, inveighing against the European Union in the pugnacious style she honed as a lawyer, warning the government to “stop taking the people for fools”.
  • (3) Nel, nicknamed "the pitbull", is diminutive and pugnacious and a sharp contrast to the tall, silver-haired, urbane Roux.
  • (4) The Guardian has found that Trump’s pugnacious campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski , has more experience in this field than was previously known, having resorted to litigation in his only election as a candidate himself.
  • (5) It appeared to be designed as a permanent – and pugnacious – installation, with none of the usual ropes and pulleys.
  • (6) I wouldn’t have gone in.” National security also sparked the standout clash of the night, when Paul, the libertarian who did most in the Senate to end the bulk collection of phone records in the wake of the disclosures from the whistleblower Edward Snowden , collided with Chris Christie, the pugnacious New Jersey governor.
  • (7) On Friday morning, Rahm Emanuel, the brilliantly pugnacious mayor of Chicago, and former White House chief of staff, told me that, as the grandson of a migrant, he would not assist Trump’s attempts to entrap undocumented children, but instead continue to support them through his community college programme.
  • (8) The pugnacious Schulberg rejected this and broke with party discipline, publishing What Makes Sammy Run?
  • (9) McBride, a football-loving and pugnacious former Treasury civil servant drawn into Brown's inner circle, paid yesterday with his career.
  • (10) "Blowing up the Red Road eyesores is a typically pugnacious Glaswegian way of celebrating the Games.
  • (11) Getting out of the third round proved as tough as he suspected for Dimitrov, who needed three hours and 28 minutes to subdue the pugnacious crowd favourite Marcos Baghdatis in five competitive sets in the early-afternoon heat.
  • (12) Montgomerie, who now edits the Times comment section, had suggested that Gove was excessively "pugnacious and confrontational" in his dealings with the teaching profession.
  • (13) Despite Blanco’s refusal, Ramirez announced he was imposing state command over Cuernavaca’s police, and he suggested dark forces were influencing the pugnacious former athlete, who has never before held public office.
  • (14) Rumpole of the Bailey, the pugnacious barrister created by John Mortimer, of course constantly resisted promotion to the bench.
  • (15) He certainly demonstrates a similar steely resolve, pugnaciousness and disdain for consensus politics that was the hallmark of the Iron Lady.
  • (16) The pugnacious Bannon, a former head of the rightwing Bretibart News who has been dubbed “Trump’s Rasputin”, spoke as if on permanent war footing.
  • (17) • China's "newly pugnacious" foreign policy is "losing friends worldwide", the US ambassador to Beijing argued in a cable .
  • (18) Chris Christie , the pugnacious governor of New Jersey who staked his 2016 presidential campaign on a strong showing in the New Hampshire primary, has suspended his candidacy after winning less than 10% of the vote on Tuesday, a campaign staffer confirmed to the Guardian.
  • (19) Erdoğan said voters had opted for stability, but in characteristically pugnacious form in Istanbul, he also attacked the global media and its criticism of him.
  • (20) As charming and as pugnacious as ever, he survived what might have been disgrace and was certainly unpopularity as an active, cheerful and still optimistic man.