What's the difference between petty and stubborn?

Petty


Definition:

  • (superl.) Little; trifling; inconsiderable; also, inferior; subordinate; as, a petty fault; a petty prince.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The only thing the media will talk about in the hours and days after the debate will be Trump’s refusal to say he will accept the results of the election, making him appear small, petty and conspiratorial.
  • (2) I realize it’s petty, but it’s like the Michael Bolton thing from Office Space.
  • (3) Winston Churchill, when he was offered the role of minister of the local government board in 1906, commented: "There is no place more laborious, more anxious, more thankless, more cloaked with petty and even squalid detail, more full of hopeless and insoluble difficulties."
  • (4) Let’s make sure it’s not on the usual plane of politics and point-scoring and pettiness that drifts away in the next news cycle.
  • (5) We took all the feedback from users and put pencil to paper to create our consumer 3D printer built for speed and ease of use,” said Pettis.
  • (6) Facebook Twitter Pinterest China dismisses Trump call with Taiwan as ‘small trick’ However, Beijing’s public response has so far been measured, with the foreign ministry lodging a “solemn representation” with Washington and the foreign minister, Wang Yi, downplaying the development as “a petty move” by Taiwan.
  • (7) She won’t apologize for whatever makes the New York Times treat her with middle-school levels of petty scorn .
  • (8) The president should have directed the Justice Department to stop taking stupid points and petty appeals.” One reason the Justice Department pursued the habeas cases so hard was its client: the Pentagon.
  • (9) As the locus of many migrants' investments, the village of Los Pinos has experienced a modest growth in the number of full-time jobs paying somewhat above the minimum urban wage and in a variety of petty entrepreneurial activities depending heavily on the patronage of migrant households, themselves heavily subsidized by remittances.
  • (10) Indeed watching the prime minister singling out unemployed youngsters for uniquely punitive measures while pretending it is for their own good, cheered on by a gang of braying chums, it looks less like the behaviour of a national statesman and more like the petty vindictiveness of a schoolyard bully.
  • (11) Some are retired, others straddle the uncertain worlds of petty trading, agriculture and seasonal migrant labour.
  • (12) Not long ago, the mecca of American tourism was populated by sex workers, transvestites, drug addicts and petty criminals, rather than middle-class tourists.
  • (13) All the petty differences that divide us seem to melt away.
  • (14) Abdeslam relied on a large network of friends and relatives that already existed for drug dealing and petty crime to keep him in hiding,” Belgium’s federal prosecutor, Frederic Van Leeuw, told Belgian public broadcaster RTBF.
  • (15) Another said: "The problem with PMQs isn't so much that it's shouty but that the so-called pinnacle of political debate in this country is two men trading petty insults and making nasty jokes about the other while the rest of parliament boos and cheers behind them.
  • (16) They included a former monk, two young men with learning disabilities, a handful of petty criminals and a teacher at a private school in Paris who was "disappeared" by another republican group, the INLA.
  • (17) The study was conducted in the three contiguous counties of Johnson, Lafayette and Pettis in west central Missouri.
  • (18) Edgar Mitchell, the Apollo 14 Lunar Module Pilot, said that walking on the Moon gives you an instant global consciousness, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it, that international politics look so petty.
  • (19) It also found that some children were put into care without lawful basis, including for petty theft and for being rude.
  • (20) Parents are required to bring up children responsibly, while living in a form of servitude to licensed employers and petty line managers, often themselves at risk of returning to zero-hours.

Stubborn


Definition:

  • (a.) Firm as a stub or stump; stiff; unbending; unyielding; persistent; hence, unreasonably obstinate in will or opinion; not yielding to reason or persuasion; refractory; harsh; -- said of persons and things; as, stubborn wills; stubborn ore; a stubborn oak; as stubborn as a mule.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) It has announced a four-stage programme of reforms that will tackle most of these stubborn and longstanding problems, including Cinderella issues such as how energy companies treat their small business customers.
  • (2) Of course there are some who are stubborn, like Robert Mugabe.
  • (3) The prime minister insisted, however, that he and other world leaders were not being stubborn over demands that the Syrian leader, President Bashar al-Assad, step down at the end of the peace process.
  • (4) It’s clear their relationship is most similar to that of a stubborn son and his long suffering mother.
  • (5) The contrast between these two worlds – one legal and flourishing, the other illegal and stubbornly disregarding of state lines – can seem baffling, yet it may have profound consequences for whether this unique experiment spreads.
  • (6) The causes of failure after acute injury include extensive local soft tissue and bony damage, severe concomitant head, chest or abdominal wounding, stubborn reliance on negative arteriograms in patients with probable arterial injury, failure to repair simultaneous venous injuries, or harvesting of a vein graft from a severely damaged extremity.
  • (7) "It was the character of David Cameron – his stubbornness, his anger and his rush towards war – which was the central cause of his defeat on Thursday night."
  • (8) Rebus, promised the Scottish author, will be "as stubborn and anarchic as ever", and will find himself in trouble with the author's latest creation, Malcolm Fox, of Edinburgh's internal affairs unit.
  • (9) A rising jobless total and an unemployment rate sticking at a stubbornly high 8% overshadowed a better than expected 27,100 fall in the claimant count in April, which compared with analysts' forecasts for a 20,000 drop.
  • (10) But the part of me that resists that, that is stubborn and wants to bulldoze things, gets in my way.
  • (11) One is the stubborn mystery of how a giant of its liberation movements, an intellectual who showed forgiveness and magnanimity years before Mandela emerged from jail, could turn into the living caricature of despotism.
  • (12) Sanctioning is no longer a last resort tactic aimed at the stubbornly workshy, say critics, but a crude way of pushing down claimant numbers and cutting back on the benefits bill.
  • (13) He was only 29 at the time, but nevertheless had that kind of stubborn certainty.
  • (14) They have a sort of stubbornness.” He later deals with hecklers at a Fifa HQ press event : “Listen, gentlemen, we are not in a bazaar .
  • (15) Dombrovskis stubbornly refused, instead pursuing "internal devaluation", depressing wages and conducting what he says was a 17% fiscal adjustment programme (the IMF says 15%).
  • (16) They formed a stubborn line in front of Wojciech Szczesny’s goal even if the statistics showed Arsenal’s pass-completion rate went down from 89% in the first half to 66% in the second.
  • (17) This was the first time a grouping of BME senior managers crossing health and social care had met together to look at barriers to gaining top jobs, and ways of breaking through systems which stubbornly never seem to shift.
  • (18) Broadly defined, this sort of behaviour involves procrastination, stubbornness, resentment, sullenness, obstructionism, self-pity and a tendency to create chaotic situations.
  • (19) At which point – obviously – you reach the stubborn limits of the debate: from even the most supposedly imaginative Labour people as much as any Tories, such heresies would presumably be greeted with sneering derision.
  • (20) A stubborn negativity characterised the insurrection.