What's the difference between pliant and tractable?

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.

Tractable


Definition:

  • (v. t.) Capable of being easily led, taught, or managed; docile; manageable; governable; as, tractable children; a tractable learner.
  • (v. t.) Capable of being handled; palpable; practicable; feasible; as, tractable measures.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The estimators are tractable even when there are incomplete observations.
  • (2) A smooth isolated, axisymmetric occlusion in a straight vascular tube is a tractable problem for pulsatile flow calculations via finite-difference approximations to the Navier-Stokes equation.
  • (3) Factor analysis was used as a statistical means to make the complex variables generated by the system more tractable to analysis.
  • (4) Evolutionary effects such as linkage disequilibrium and conservation of exons (DNA encoding structural proteins) as well as the fact that there are a tractable number of gene clusters involved, tend to make it quite likely that DNA pathology or DNA variation (polymorphism) predisposing to mental illness can be detected.
  • (5) Furthermore, the recognition of disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC) in an early, tractable phase may be a matter of life and death.
  • (6) The model is distinctive in its ability to capture a significant broadening of auditory-nerve fiber frequency selectivity as a function of increasing sound-pressure level within a computationally tractable time-invariant structure.
  • (7) It is suggested that the use of biomarkers for persistent chemicals may be useful to mitigate the difficulty of determining exposure, while the use of more prevalent and timely end points, such as carcinogen-DNA adducts or oncogene proteins, may make the latency and rarity problems more tractable.
  • (8) Of particular interest to plant developmental biologists is the phenomenon of somatic embryogenesis in cultures of the domesticated carrot which, because of its tractable nature in experimental manipulations, is presently regarded as a suitable model for studying pattern formation in plants.
  • (9) The chain statistics problem is treated in an approximate manner using an approach motivated by scaled particle theory to describe the inter-chain steric repulsions in a mathematically tractable way.
  • (10) By ignoring cognitive factors and memory, a first-order Markov approach is taken, which is tractable for spatially homogeneous stimuli.
  • (11) The LI during the healing stage was higher than that during the active stage in both the tractable and intractable cases.
  • (12) In those cases where tractable models of heterogeneous systems can be developed, the experimental data are consistent with drops in PO2 on the order of a few hundredths of a Torr between cytosol and mitochondrion.
  • (13) In the world view Rubio outlined Wednesday, which he billed as a new doctrine, certain regional conflicts that look very difficult – the ongoing war in Syria, the failed state of Libya – in fact began as tractable problems that spun out of control due to tragic US negligence.
  • (14) Mathematically tractable alternatives are the linear formalism and the power-law formalism.
  • (15) With improvements in anaerobic handling procedures, this is beginning to change, and several experimentally tractable regulated systems of gene expression in methanogens are discussed.
  • (16) The main goals of the analysis are: to provide improved understanding of biochemical dynamics and their physiological significance, and to yield reduced dynamic models that are physiologically realistic but tractable for practical use.
  • (17) Results of this investigation suggest that bulimia displays a chronic but tractable course in that the majority of the patients continued to report bulimic behaviors at follow-up but the symptom intensity was greatly reduced from admission.
  • (18) Therefore, this review summarizes the rationale behind various experimental approaches, the nature and tractability of limitations, and the results which can be safely drawn from experimental studies to date.
  • (19) This approximation often makes the governing equations tractable, and analytical solutions may then be obtained.
  • (20) As a non-obligate metazoan, Dictyostelium discoideum has proven a particularly tractable system in which to identify and characterize cellular morphogens.