What's the difference between scathing and vitriolic?

Scathing


Definition:

  • (p. pr. & vb. n.) of Scath

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Bill Gates betrayed his ailing business partner and tried to deprive him of his share of the Microsoft fortune, according to a scathing memoir from Paul Allen , the company's billionaire co-founder.
  • (2) Abramovich, as you might expect, is now scathing about Berezovsky.
  • (3) Those sorts of failures and might-have-beens have pockmarked Kerry’s record, and the rebukes he has faced have at times been scathing.
  • (4) Myners – a non-executive director of Co-op group – was also scathing in his assessment of the board members after asking them a simple retail question and likening their inability to answer to that of Paul Flowers, former chairman of the Co-op bank, who had stumbled over basic questions posed by the Treasury select committee last year.
  • (5) ( more from Dean Baker here ) Other critics of austerity were equally scathing (Paul Krugman posted once , then twice ) .
  • (6) Her attacks on the president are scathing and she sees him as a busted flush, placing herself at the heart of drives to rebuild the French right after Sarkozy "implodes" at the election.
  • (7) Australia's prime minister, Kevin Rudd, was scathing about the EU package for Greece over three years agreed last weekend by 15 eurozone countries and the International Monetary Fund: "Markets have judged those arrangements to be inadequate," he said .
  • (8) An NHS trust's lack of honesty caused "unnecessary pain and further distress" to a family who had already suffered from the tragic and avoidable death of a baby boy, the health service ombudsman has said in the latest scathing verdict on the defensive culture within the health service.
  • (9) What the president thinks is it’s quite clear that new leadership with a set of skills and experiences that are unique to the challenges that OPM faces are urgently needed.” Republicans were scathing in their response to the scandal.
  • (10) Wong says he has been shocked by its silence at critical moments and is scathing overall: “It just focuses on trade deals.” And that, perhaps, is the subtext of the new documentary’s title.
  • (11) In a scathing assessment, the CQC reported it had found: “a culture of bullying and harassment” that “morale was low” and that “the decision in 2013 to remove 220 posts across the trust and down band several hundred more nursing staff has had a significant impact on morale and has stretched staffing levels in many areas” that “staffing was a key challenge across all services” poor implementation of a new IT system “had impacted on patient safety and care” and “patients were struggling to get appointments and be recognised as needing care and treatment” in A&E “there were delays in patients being assessed and in handovers taking place for patients who arrived by ambulance” and some patients were seen by the CQC to have received what it called “sub-optimal care”.
  • (12) Labour MP Margaret Hodge, who chairs the committee, was scathing about the size of the payoff.
  • (13) He also attempted to calm the waters after scathing reports about the Downing Street dinner with May that he and the European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker , attended last week.
  • (14) Today staff who worked on the ill-fated magazine were scathing about Lebedev, who became the first Russian (and ex-KGB spy) to own a UK title when he bought a controlling stake in the Evening Standard in January.
  • (15) While focusing criticism on a few members of the regiment – particularly Corporal Donald Payne, Lieutenant Craig Rodgers and Lieutenant Colonel Jorge Mendonca – the report also passes scathing comment on the role of the unit's regimental medical officer, Dr Derek Keilloh, and its padre, Father Peter Madden.
  • (16) Mark Rock, the founder and chief executive of sound-sharing application Audioboo , was scathing about the industry's moves towards digital switchover and the decision to base principally around DAB radio.
  • (17) It is particularly scathing about the practice of some officials personally targeting political opponents including successive home secretaries, the Tory former chief whip Andrew Mitchell , and Tom Winsor, who produced the official report proposing significant police reforms.
  • (18) Russia’s nuclear sabre-rattling is unjustified, destabilising and dangerous Jens Stoltenberg In blunt language, the Nato chief delivered a scathing critique of Russia’s behaviour over the past year – including Moscow’s armed intervention in Ukraine – and vowed the transatlantic alliance would redouble its commitment to “collective defence”.
  • (19) As a consequence, he's the go-to guy for a scathing quote on dissembling theologies and their gullible believers.
  • (20) A scathing report by the Department of Justice last week concluded that Ferguson’s police and court system was blighted by racial bias .

Vitriolic


Definition:

  • (a.) Of or pertaining to vitriol; derived from, or resembling, vitriol; vitriolous; as, a vitriolic taste. Cf. Vitriol.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Academic and TV historian Mary Beard has disclosed her innovative approach to dealing with her vitriolic Twitter trolls – writing them a job reference.
  • (2) For every “coterie” of Audens, Spenders and Isherwoods, there is a chorus of George Orwells, Roy Campbells and Dylan Thomases, spitting vitriol.
  • (3) Bin Laden, who was 54 when he died, also had a copy of The America I Have Seen, a vitriolic memoir of a short trip to the US by the Egyptian thinker and activist Syed Qutb , considered the godfather of modern jihadi thinking and hanged in 1966.
  • (4) They do not step up to defend the government, its leaders, and their policies from criticism, no matter how vitriolic; indeed, they seem to avoid controversial issues entirely,” the study’s authors write of members of China’s “enormous workforce” of online propagandists.
  • (5) Melanie is a columnist for the Daily Mail and is mostly known for her knee-jerk, right-wing, hang-em-high vitriol.
  • (6) As one long-time British journalist told me this week when discussing the vitriol of the British press toward Assange: "Nothing delights British former lefties more than an opportunity to defend power while pretending it is a brave stance in defence of a left liberal principle."
  • (7) Like many, I was shocked and disturbed by the vitriolic attacks on women by the website and its supporters.
  • (8) I don’t believe it is that vitriolic or open or contentious,” he said.
  • (9) A conservative education commentator reviewing the national curriculum has hit back at “vitriolic” attacks on his credentials, arguing he would be “near the top of the list” of people best qualified to examine the issue.
  • (10) If I was allowed to use more vitriolic words to describe them, I would.
  • (11) But that is nothing compared to the vitriol and even death threats she has been exposed to since emerging as the principal legal challenger to the government’s Brexit plans.
  • (12) Whereas the guitarist made his remarks on Twitter, restraining himself to just 76 characters, Morrissey used the blog True to You to issue 11 paragraphs of vegetarian vitriol .
  • (13) Photograph: Teri Pengilley for the Guardian In Scotland, vitriol replaced or supplemented sour milk and citric acid in textile bleaching and dyeing at a time when linen and cotton were Scotland’s largest manufacturing industries.
  • (14) Few who spew this vitriol would dare speak with the type of personalized scorn toward, say, George Bush or Tony Blair – who actually launched an aggressive war that resulted in the deaths of at least 100,000 innocent people and kidnapped people from around the globe with no due process and sent them to be tortured.
  • (15) Elsewhere in Cairo, many pro-army Egyptians – protesting at counter-demonstrations – launched similar vitriol at Morsi's supporters, in an indication of Egypt's deep divisions.
  • (16) There’s no bitterness or vitriol on show here, musically at least, with Bowman’s laidback vocals gliding serenely over a juddering, stop-­start beat that eventually disintegrates.
  • (17) With the kind of behaviour and vitriol that exists on Twitter and in public discourse about female politicians, and women more generally, I think it’s really naive to think that it exists in a bubble and doesn’t infiltrate culture more generally, and that it won’t influence behaviour,” says Claire Annesley, professor of politics at the University of Sussex.
  • (18) However, there is another pernicious reason for our failure to act: the bitter, often vitriolic campaigns of climate change deniers – men and women (but mostly men) who simply refuse to accept that humanity is changing weather systems.
  • (19) Haaland shakes his head as he recalls the vitriol in Keane's words: "It was the worst tackle ever, especially as he obviously set out to do it, as he says in his book.
  • (20) aegypti sensitivity to bird malaria agent P. gallinaceum by sublethal concentrations of herbicides (ordram and propanide) and fungicides (fundozol and blue vitriol) introduced into the larvae habitation medium or into the imago feed.