What's the difference between placid and pliant?

Placid


Definition:

  • (a.) Pleased; contented; unruffied; undisturbed; serene; peaceful; tranquil; quiet; gentle.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The Ss became extremely placid and tame or were profoundly depressed in their overall behavior most of the time.
  • (2) Infants in the third quartile were fussy at the commencement of the period and became gradually more placid from the fifth week of life.
  • (3) I vote for who I want.” embed The Guardian asked Placide, who was naturalized as an American citizen in 1990 and who works an evening shift for a nursing agency to put her two children through college, whether she thought Trump had made America great again.
  • (4) There are vast areas in which my peaceful indifference to what Amazon is and does can only be surpassed by Amazon’s presumably equally placid indifference to what I say and do.
  • (5) "A lot of teens in the early noughties were taking ketamine, which was a very placid, down drug that kept you in your own zone.
  • (6) As our car crawls through central London, from WPP's Mayfair head office to Millbank, where Sorrell is to sit on a panel, the dog sits placidly in the back, lolling its head in the sun.
  • (7) One personality was irritable and hostile, the other placid; in each case, a major seizure preceded the shift from the former to the latter.
  • (8) Even Angela Merkel of Germany, that placid sheet anchor of European stability, faces grassroots challenges from left and right.
  • (9) Read today's Rumour Mill here 9.23am BST Germany's Per Mertesacker is a pretty placid guy off the pitch, so when he gets shirty with a journalist you know he's had a long day.
  • (10) Do we just placidly accept their ideologically driven desire to drive back the frontiers of the state, to cut and privatise?
  • (11) And I don’t think I have ever achieved that almost pastoral Christmas nirvana, always promoted in tinselly TV ads, of just sitting placidly around after Christmas lunch and then smilingly responding as one’s child shows you a present without complaining or demanding anything.
  • (12) Were this just the froth of diehard Brexiteers at an otherwise placid time, we’d move on faster than you could say “ Bill Cash” .
  • (13) They need to get it done.” Facebook Twitter Pinterest Marie Claire Placide, a dress shop owner and fashion designer, in Bangor, Pennsylvania.
  • (14) Aisikaier's life at the park is placid, if not slightly purgatorial.
  • (15) He wanted so much to convince his mates that he really had spied a miracle and to make sure that his normally placid mind had not fallen victim of some strange figment of the imagination, a confidence trick, a sudden mirage brought on by the unrelenting rays of the sun.'
  • (16) Danny Rynne, a scaffolder from Enfield, described Mahmoud as “lovely” and “placid”.
  • (17) After suffering a carbon monoxide intoxication, a thirty-nine-year-old patient presented a marked behavioral change, with a severe anterograde and retrograde amnesia, extreme placidity, bulimia, and hypersexuality.
  • (18) They noticed that 19 of the 20 patients were mentally slower; 11 were markedly aggressive and 8 had become placid and uncaring about family problems.
  • (19) By way of contrast to events earlier in the tour, where large crowds have turned out, the duke and duchess were greeted sedately by the islanders who brought out picnic chairs and sat placidly waiting on the grass verges at the side of the road leading from the airport to the tiny capital, Charlottetown.
  • (20) The great majority of the infants were very placid.

Pliant


Definition:

  • (v.) Capable of plying or bending; readily yielding to force or pressure without breaking; flexible; pliable; lithe; limber; plastic; as, a pliant thread; pliant wax. Also used figuratively: Easily influenced for good or evil; tractable; as, a pliant heart.
  • (v.) Favorable to pliancy.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) But it helped that he faced only one opponent, that a pliant local media portrayed support for Sisi as a patriotic duty, and that the election came amid a continuing crackdown on all forms of opposition.
  • (2) For these sites thin and pliant fasciocutaneous flaps are ideal tissue transfers, and we favour the radial forearm flap which is raised from the distal volar forearm.
  • (3) In several instances in which preadenoidectomy mechanical obstruction of the Eustachian tube was not demonstrated, the tube appeared to have been made more pliant by the operation.
  • (4) "For the most part the rewards for acquiescing to GOC demands are risible: pomp-full dinners and meetings and, for the most pliant, a photo op with one of the Castro brothers.
  • (5) The chancellor, George Osborne, and health secretary Jeremy Hunt would be very happy to devolve these political hot potatoes to pliant and cash-strapped local bodies.
  • (6) Putin also said outside forces would use intelligence services, the media and non-governmental organisations to destabilise Russia and make it "pliant in deciding issues in favour of the interests of other governments".
  • (7) "For 40 years the tobacco companies were able to persuade pliant politicians within their grip to tell the public what they wanted them to tell them, and for 40 years the tragedy continued," Gore told ABC TV's 7.30 program from Los Angeles on Wednesday night.
  • (8) President Asif Ali Zardari has vowed to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaida, but cuts an increasingly forlorn figure because he is seen as too pliant to the US in a country where anti-American sentiment is high.
  • (9) Like maths and music, languages sink in faster and deeper before concerns about sex and jobs besiege the pliant brain.
  • (10) If one interrupts that sort of pliant texture operatively-unless their is an urgent indication-unprofitable results must be expected, which correspond to orthopedic experiences.
  • (11) While the fashion press and the beauty industry remain invested in the idea of young women as pliant, affable and terminally anxious about getting boys to like them, real women and girls are fighting back against a culture that persists in trying to present our desires and rebrand our politics as fluffy and marketable.
  • (12) Those courts once had a reputation for independence, but that changed under Mubarak, who made changes to personnel and to the rules on the appointment of judges which over time left mainly pliant men on the bench, ready either to take “guidance” on cases or to accommodate what they imagined would be the government’s desires.
  • (13) Critics have accused Erdogan of seeking to diminish the importance of the Turkish parliament and also seeking to make the independent judiciary far more pliant.
  • (14) Some fear his next move will be to go after Jega, the electoral chief, and replace him with someone more pliant.
  • (15) The distal flap is thin and pliant due to the small amount of subcutaneous tissue and the fairly long vascular pedicle.
  • (16) It is a comfortable-seeming thing, flexible without being adjustable, giving without being pliant.
  • (17) To keep its grip, the regime uses its network of personal and official ties to Britain’s too pliant monarchy, to gullible congressional politicians, and to business and investment leaders overly impressed by its $1tn (£660bn) in cash reserves and its global investment portfolio.
  • (18) Tolokonnikova has also continued to appeal against her guilty verdict through the Moscow court system, and is one step away from it reaching the country's pliant supreme court.
  • (19) For several years the Liberal Democrat side of the government, in which I served as Nick Clegg’s national security adviser, staved off the woefully unevidenced plan (hawked around Westminster by pliant ministers since 2008) for new powers to force internet companies to retain highly personal communications data (aka the “snooper’s charter”).
  • (20) The British media may be attacked for the weakness of its investigative reporting and the salaciousness and dodgy practices of the tabloids, but I would rather err on the side of a profession that is hard to control than one that is pliant.