What's the difference between pithy and sententious?

Pithy


Definition:

  • (superl.) Consisting wholly, or in part, of pith; abounding in pith; as, a pithy stem; a pithy fruit.
  • (superl.) Having nervous energy; forceful; cogent.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) And while Altmejd presents sexual scenes of cartoonish horror and disgust, Lucas's art has embraced lavatorial humour, abjection, self-denigration, the pithy sculptural one-liner and the obscene gesture.
  • (2) This headline is a closely packed, multifaceted, pithy, rousing, basically perfect example of how strikes are presented in the tabloids, and have been for years.
  • (3) In fact, her pithy insults are deployed so regularly that colleagues on the spending watchdog have come up with the idea of playing “Margaret Hodge bingo”, scoring points when one of her putdowns pops out.
  • (4) The reshuffle had inspired some pithy one-liners and the PM was determined to deploy them all.
  • (5) Someone who bought tickets for a tennis event at the O2 sent me this pithy tweet: “4 tickets.
  • (6) There are plenty of 30-page documents and pithy slogans – but, as far as I can discover, nothing in between.
  • (7) It was a pithy line that feeds into the schtick about a bloated Brussels filled with born bureaucrats.
  • (8) The hawkish senator also defined his foreign policy: “A clenched fist and an open hand, you choose.” But the extent to which such pithy quips will help bolster Graham’s campaign – the senator is currently polling at 0.5% – remains questionable.
  • (9) But he has left Labour vulnerable over Brexit because the policy is so nuanced it cannot easily be boiled down to a pithy remark .
  • (10) Shortly after the YouTube sensation that was Jeremy Paxman's October interview with Russell Brand , Paxman wrote a pithy column about his disillusion with Westminster politics.
  • (11) Johnson, whose pithy interventions have caused embarrassment for all the major parties since the election campaign kicked off, opened the debate by stressing the gulf between the two major parties’ tax and spending plans.
  • (12) Sated by three years of Special One pyrotechnics, the British press might be ready to be charmed by Ramos' brand of quietly pithy humour.
  • (13) Obama: While the president generally struggled to get his "zingers" across, over-larding them with too much detail, he did get in a pithy dig about Romney's vague budget proposals which he claimed didn't add up.
  • (14) Jimmy Fallon, the host of the 2017 Golden Globes, has made a career of creating pithy viral moments that transcend television and resonate on the internet, but at this year’s ceremony the host was outdone by a bizarre recurring slip-up.
  • (15) In the months since their formation, the eight members of Pussy Riot have perfected their own form of protest: their songs are pithy, angry missives, largely directed at Putin, and they remain beguilingly anonymous – the band wear neon balaclavas to conceal their identities and perform flash gigs in unexpected places: on public transport, for example, and, once, on a prison roof.
  • (16) Instead, finance ministers signed up to a pithy list of bullet points, pledging to unleash all the policy weapons at their disposal against the crisis.
  • (17) The club was the brainchild of New Jersey shoe salesman Barney Josephson: a pithy antidote to the snooty, often racist elitism of other New York nightspots.
  • (18) But threnodies are not an argument, and memories are definitely not facts (Hobsbawm's pithy condemnation of oral history, delivered at a conference where I was due to speak, was terrifying).
  • (19) From a leader not known for her trenchant words or pithy sound bites her strong stance of the past few days has come as a surprise.
  • (20) You might expect he’d specialise in pithy one-liners, but in fact Delaney spins longer yarns onstage, all powered by a spirit of relentless cynicism.

Sententious


Definition:

  • (a.) Abounding with sentences, axioms, and maxims; full of meaning; terse and energetic in expression; pithy; as, a sententious style or discourse; sententious truth.
  • (a.) Comprising or representing sentences; sentential.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) This study provides normative data for teenagers' performance on tests of time-compressed sentential material.
  • (2) Consistent with previous reports of normative data at other age levels, performance became poorer for 0 to either 40 or 60% TC (there was a negligible difference between the latter), was better for normal sentences than for sentential approximations, and improved slightly in the higher grades.
  • (3) Stimuli that were syntactically structured and contained a sentencelike rhythm were spoken with shorter durations than nonsyntactic stimuli with sentential rhythm but only by 8-year-olds and adults.
  • (4) Both samples of disabled readers appeared able to use syntactic information as an independent source of sentential information in reading, even the sample whose reading disability was associated with oral syntax deficits.
  • (5) The appropriateness of using a picture description task which involves a perceptual step-by-step account of unrelated events to assess sentential semantics and the conveying of information at a conceptual level is discussed.
  • (6) In an initial paper on this topic (Rips, 1989), I proposed a model for a subset of such problems that depend on sentential reasoning.
  • (7) Ability of eight good and eight poor readers (in Grade 1, ages ranging from 6.7 to 7.4 yr.) to discriminate phonemic contrasts presented in 50% time-compressed sentential stimuli (Subtest 13 of the Carrow-Auditory Visual Abilities Test) was measured.
  • (8) The latter findings suggest, respectively, that the semantic features of sentence subjects are of minimal relevance to the syntactic and morphological processes that implement agreement, and that agreement features are specified at a point in processing where the eventual length of sentential constituents has little effect on syntactic planning.
  • (9) The Hoppe-Bogen finding of alexithymia in 12 commissurotomy patients is examined, using 6 sentential-level items corresponding to 6 of the 8 key alexithymia items in the Beth Israel 'Psychosomatic Questionnaire'.
  • (10) The results suggest that native signers process lexical structural automatically, such that they can attend to and remember lexical and sentential meaning.
  • (11) This study compared the performance of normal-reading and reading-impaired children using time-compressed three- and five-word sentential approximations to full grammaticality, and the Word Intelligibility by Picture Identification (WIPI) test presented with and without pictures.
  • (12) 25 4-word, first, and second-order sentential approximations were presented to 18 aphasic and 18 normal children.
  • (13) This suggests that the presence of sentential context allows listeners to factor out the influence of phrase-final lengthening on vowel duration and to more accurately interpret this cue to voicing of the final fricative.
  • (14) Their account posits five processing strategies tailored to this problem domain and a mechanism for evaluating sentential arguments based on mental models.
  • (15) His solemnity and sententiousness are much better, much funnier, coming from someone so "young".
  • (16) The results show that sentential contexts do not preselect a set of contextually appropriate words before any sensory information about the spoken word is available.
  • (17) The present results suggest some disturbance in the patients' ability to manipulate fundamental frequency across sentential domains.
  • (18) This study measured the ability of 16 aged listeners, normal for their age (age range, 63 to 84 yr.) to discriminate phonemic contrasts in sentential stimuli (Subtest 13 of the Carrow-Auditory Visual Abilities Test) presented at 50% time-compression rate.
  • (19) Productions of phonemic stress tokens (e.g., Re'dcoat vs. red coa't) as well as examples of contrastive stress, or sentential emphasis (e.g., Sam hated the movie), were elicited from eight male speakers with unilateral right hemisphere CVAs and seven male control subjects.
  • (20) When Seb Coe stood up and said at the opening ceremony, before it all unfolded, that what he hoped for the Games was that "we will be able to tell our children and our grandchildren that we did it right", it sounded a bit sententious.