What's the difference between profane and sanctify?

Profane


Definition:

  • (a.) Not sacred or holy; not possessing peculiar sanctity; unconsecrated; hence, relating to matters other than sacred; secular; -- opposed to sacred, religious, or inspired; as, a profane place.
  • (a.) Unclean; impure; polluted; unholy.
  • (a.) Treating sacred things with contempt, disrespect, irreverence, or undue familiarity; irreverent; impious.
  • (a.) Irreverent in language; taking the name of God in vain; given to swearing; blasphemous; as, a profane person, word, oath, or tongue.
  • (a.) To violate, as anything sacred; to treat with abuse, irreverence, obloquy, or contempt; to desecrate; to pollute; as, to profane the name of God; to profane the Scriptures, or the ordinance of God.
  • (a.) To put to a wrong or unworthy use; to make a base employment of; to debase; to abuse; to defile.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Perhaps he modified his language for the NY Times reporter, but the more likely explanation is that his swearing added nothing and was therefore omitted by the writer or edited out; in America, even in liberal New York, profanities still need to be argued into print.
  • (2) Extensive research among the Afghan National Army – 68 focus groups – and US military personnel alike concluded: "One group sees the other as a bunch of violent, reckless, intrusive, arrogant, self-serving profane, infidel bullies hiding behind high technology; and the other group [the US soldiers] generally views the former as a bunch of cowardly, incompetent, obtuse, thieving, complacent, lazy, pot-smoking, treacherous, and murderous radicals.
  • (3) Throughout his life, Dad observed the rule that profanity – effing and blinding as he called it – should be confined to workplaces and other all-male venues where men gathered outside the earshot of women and children.
  • (4) McQueen told this tale several times – the words varied from “McQueen was here” to more profane messages, between tellings – and so, years later, Anderson & Sheppard asked the prince’s valet for the suits of that era back, in order to examine the linings.
  • (5) The phychological aspects of language show an antithesis between learned and profane languages.
  • (6) A few years back, a survey of 3,000 11-year-olds revealed that nine out of 10 parents swear in front of their children, and the average kid heard six different expletives per week (whoever said profanity was bad for your vocabulary?).
  • (7) "Not just because it's wrong to expect officers to endure profanities, but it's also because of the experience of the culprits.
  • (8) Here, in the profane world of anti-music, I could be a hater and say: "This is where the rock'n'roll dream dies.
  • (9) This research examined 160 college students' impressions of an audiotape of a female counselor who used profanity with either a male or female client who did or did not use profanity.
  • (10) Inside the cinema-like forum, all was concentrated silence punctuated by an occasional profanity or a murmur of "My God, North lied all along" from the readers.
  • (11) Effects of counselor's profanity and subject's religiosity on acquisition of lecture content and behavioral compliance were investigated.
  • (12) She was praised by many but also criticised harshly as a result of this exhibition, as her unapologetic nudity was seen by many as downright profane.
  • (13) You expect movie ratings to tell you whether a film contains nudity, sex, profanity or violence.
  • (14) One profanity-ridden post concluded with: "John Oliver told me to do this."
  • (15) Motion pictures were not born in religious practice, but instead are a totally profane offspring of capitalism and technology,” writes Paul Schrader in his landmark book, Transcendental Style in Film, in which he isolates two strains of religious film-making: the epics of Cecil B DeMille, presenting religion as spectacle, with teeming hordes, VistaVision, shafts of light, and strangely subdued orgies.
  • (16) She was roundly abused and Lord Carrington , the Economist and many others told her she was being profane.
  • (17) "It has mad amounts of violence, blood and profanity, and no shortage of racist and homophobic things.
  • (18) Boehner and his staff gamely tried to fend off both the specter of a shutdown and a leadership challenge from his caucus’ more belligerent culture warriors – as late as yesterday, a Boehner spokesman was assuring the press that the battle-tested speaker “wasn’t going anywhere.” No doubt, however, that a cursory look at the long train of sober spiritual leaders in his caucus lining up to deliver pointless CSPAN tantrums over the outrages of science prompted the longtime Ohio Congressman to mutter some variant of Good Lord, not this again together with a few well-chosen profanities for good measure.
  • (19) Cultural comprehensions and spirit of time are registered in numerous sacred and profane monuments of art.
  • (20) A profanity-strewn squabble with bewildered old John Motson was trotted out; Fergie time; the hairdryer treatment; the intimidation of some match officials; the trackside battles with Wenger and Benitez.

Sanctify


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To make sacred or holy; to set apart to a holy or religious use; to consecrate by appropriate rites; to hallow.
  • (v. t.) To make free from sin; to cleanse from moral corruption and pollution; to purify.
  • (v. t.) To make efficient as the means of holiness; to render productive of holiness or piety.
  • (v. t.) To impart or impute sacredness, venerableness, inviolability, title to reverence and respect, or the like, to; to secure from violation; to give sanction to.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Nelson Mandela, 95, and 89-year-old Robert Mugabe are two giants of southern African politics with little in common: one sanctified, the other demonised.
  • (2) Jessica Glenza Foreign policy Obama’s foreign policy was sanctified before it had properly begun.
  • (3) But religiously speaking I don't think that any human being can be sanctified to the extent that they cannot make mistakes."
  • (4) We sanctify the food, offering it to God, and that spiritualised food is called prasadam , which means the mercy of the Lord.
  • (5) In A Small Family Business (1987), without ever mentioning Mrs Thatcher but to devastatingly comic effect, Ayckbourn pinned down the essential contradiction in her beliefs: that you cannot simultaneously sanctify traditional family values and individual greed.
  • (6) You couldn't put a publishing chief executive on the recognition committee that sanctifies the new arrangement, nor on the appointments committee that puts this regulator and his or her board in place.
  • (7) Yet this debate remains trapped in the past, with the institution still pathetically over-sanctified despite a series of horrific care scandals showing the damage this myopic stance can cause vulnerable patients.
  • (8) Formal authority was no longer sanctified; the prospect of elite admonishment or discipline no longer commanded so much fear.
  • (9) Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian Boxing has been sanctified by all the fine minds who have fallen for it through the years.
  • (10) We made these sacrifices in order for Egypt to become a true democratic civil state in which human dignity is sanctified and human rights respected.
  • (11) "They cannot say that they want to separate from the Palestinians in order to prevent a binational state, which has a certain logic, and also sanctify a binational, Jewish-Arab state within the permanent borders of the state of Israel."
  • (12) A s with so much concerning Kafka – his strange life, and stranger fiction – we are almost compelled to begin with the observations of Max Brod, his friend, sanctifier and – some might argue – crypto-amanuensis.
  • (13) However he was always identified as one of the Conservative party's most prominent rebels on the matter, telling one constituent last March: "I believe that marriage is an institution ordained to sanctify a union between a man and a woman."
  • (14) Yet if the Commonwealth was sanctified by the coronation, the Mother Country felt less secure.
  • (15) The ever-blunt publisher Dennis Johnson writes , "it was as if the government not only sanctified the Amazon monopoly, but they made sure it's going to get even more dominant".
  • (16) The MEP Jussi Halla-aho of the Finns party, for instance, accuses Islam of "sanctifying paedophilia".
  • (17) A political lie is no longer sanctified by office and received as wisdom from on high.
  • (18) So the call comes again for real, parliament-sanctified law, not judge-concocted, superinjunction law in these privacy areas – and now Tom McNally, at coalition justice HQ, is promising exactly that.
  • (19) Men frequently relate to women as either "sanctified" and hence, asexual, or as sexual, and therefore "degraded."
  • (20) In ancient times this organ was sanctified and, as sacred object, its emblem formed the headdress of male and female deities.