(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.
Whip
Definition:
(v. t.) To strike with a lash, a cord, a rod, or anything slender and lithe; to lash; to beat; as, to whip a horse, or a carpet.
(v. t.) To drive with lashes or strokes of a whip; to cause to rotate by lashing with a cord; as, to whip a top.
(v. t.) To punish with a whip, scourge, or rod; to flog; to beat; as, to whip a vagrant; to whip one with thirty nine lashes; to whip a perverse boy.
(v. t.) To apply that which hurts keenly to; to lash, as with sarcasm, abuse, or the like; to apply cutting language to.
(v. t.) To thrash; to beat out, as grain, by striking; as, to whip wheat.
(v. t.) To beat (eggs, cream, or the like) into a froth, as with a whisk, fork, or the like.
(v. t.) To conquer; to defeat, as in a contest or game; to beat; to surpass.
(v. t.) To overlay (a cord, rope, or the like) with other cords going round and round it; to overcast, as the edge of a seam; to wrap; -- often with about, around, or over.
(v. t.) To sew lightly; specifically, to form (a fabric) into gathers by loosely overcasting the rolled edge and drawing up the thread; as, to whip a ruffle.
(v. t.) To take or move by a sudden motion; to jerk; to snatch; -- with into, out, up, off, and the like.
(v. t.) To hoist or purchase by means of a whip.
(v. t.) To secure the end of (a rope, or the like) from untwisting by overcasting it with small stuff.
(v. t.) To fish (a body of water) with a rod and artificial fly, the motion being that employed in using a whip.
(v. i.) To move nimbly; to start or turn suddenly and do something; to whisk; as, he whipped around the corner.
(v. t.) An instrument or driving horses or other animals, or for correction, consisting usually of a lash attached to a handle, or of a handle and lash so combined as to form a flexible rod.
(v. t.) A coachman; a driver of a carriage; as, a good whip.
(v. t.) One of the arms or frames of a windmill, on which the sails are spread.
(v. t.) The length of the arm reckoned from the shaft.
(v. t.) A small tackle with a single rope, used to hoist light bodies.
(v. t.) The long pennant. See Pennant (a)
(v. t.) A huntsman who whips in the hounds; whipper-in.
(v. t.) A person (as a member of Parliament) appointed to enforce party discipline, and secure the attendance of the members of a Parliament party at any important session, especially when their votes are needed.
(v. t.) A call made upon members of a Parliament party to be in their places at a given time, as when a vote is to be taken.
Example Sentences:
(1) When asked why the streets of London were not heaving with demonstrators protesting against Russia turning Aleppo into the Guernica of our times, Stop the War replied that it had no wish to add to the “jingoism” politicians were whipping up against plucky little Russia .
(2) The then party whip, Norman Lamb, who is now a health minister, expressed his reservations at the time, although Clegg was able to restore his authority by forcing through changes to the original bill.
(3) This House , his witty political drama set in the whips' office of 1970s Westminster, transferred from the National's Cottesloe theatre to the Olivier, following critical acclaim.
(4) Mitchell was forced to quit his cabinet post as chief whip over claims he called officers "plebs" during an altercation in Downing Street, which he denies.
(5) We don't whip homeless vagrants out of town any more, or burn big holes in their ears, as in the brutish 16th century.
(6) Lovely play by Gervinho, muscling his way far too easily past Carvalho inside the box and then finding the ball whipped away at the last by Alves.
(7) The fighters now look fat in winter combat jackets of as many different camouflage patterns as the origins of their units, hunched against a freezing wind that whips off the desert scrub.
(8) Mr Graham's play deals with the dramatic years of the 1974-9 Labour government, when Labour's whipping operation, masterminded by the fabled Walter Harrison, involved life or death decisions to fend off Margaret Thatcher's Tories.
(9) Their only win in that sequence was the less than convincing 3-2 triumph over Viktoria Plzen , the Group D whipping boys, in Saint Petersburg earlier in the month.
(10) They will whip you if you don’t pray.” In Damascus there is a new industry of “facilitators” who offer advice to Syrians who want to get out.
(11) They do not operate as a cohesive gang or a whipped party-within-a-party – not yet, anyway.
(12) Heidi Allen, the Conservative MP for South Cambridgeshire, abstained in last week’s vote but said she and others would defy the party whip if concessions were not offered.
(13) In the article, Hastings wrote: "The sacking of Michael Gove – for assuredly, his demotion from education secretary to chief whip amounts to nothing less – has shocked middle England.
(14) She added: “Jeremy then went on for the next two months refusing my insistence that he speak to Thangam, indeed refusing to speak to either of us, whether directly or through the shadow cabinet, the whips, or his own office.
(15) His free-kick was decent, he whipped the ball around the ball, but it was half-cleared before it could creep inside the far post.
(16) Intracutaneous sterile water injections have been reported to relieve acute labor pain and cervical pain in whip-lash patients.
(17) The strongly pro-EU and vocal Alistair Burt was whipped back into the Foreign Office where he had been before, while Steve Baker of the ultra-hardline anti-EU faction was made a minister in Davis’s department.
(18) The justice minister Dominic Raab said the Labour leader had promised a “kinder politics” but was now “whipping up a mob mentality”.
(19) The former Conservative chief whip Andrew Mitchell was a Jekyll and Hyde character who employed a mixture of charm and menace, his libel trial against the Sun newspaper over the Plebgate affair heard.
(20) And almost on cue, just after a minute, City nearly concede, a ball whipped in from the right by Tiote, Cisse meeting it with a low swivel on the penalty spot, Hart parrying well.