What's the difference between scurrilous and sordid?

Scurrilous


Definition:

  • (a.) Using the low and indecent language of the meaner sort of people, or such as only the license of buffoons can warrant; as, a scurrilous fellow.
  • (a.) Containing low indecency or abuse; mean; foul; vile; obscenely jocular; as, scurrilous language.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) They are not about press illegality but something mysteriously called "misdemeanour" – that is scurrility, intrusion and unfairness.
  • (2) They were there to record everything from his despair at the fickleness of his recruits, to the distress of his wife Jools at the way the media had invaded their privacy, with scurrilous rumours of infidelity.
  • (3) With its combination of scurrilous details (“flask” sized penises and a key witness called Bubba the Love Sponge) and big picture analysis (“this is the biggest First Amendment case in the internet age”), Hogan v Gawker is a classic Denton story.
  • (4) Jailed in 1971 for his part in producing the scurrilous magazine Oz, he runs the Forest of Dennis, more than 600,000 new trees covering 500 hectares, through a charitable trust.
  • (5) The flurry of scandal over Oxford University Press stopping its children’s writers from referring to pigs or pork for fear of risking Middle East sales – or the Harper Collins atlases for export that mysteriously omit Israel for the same reason – show how easily freedom slips away unless scurrilous outriders like Charlie Hebdo can keep mocking church and mosque.
  • (6) Also moving last week: • Switzerland, 26 April: Sion president Christian Constantin says reports that he could sack his fifth coach of the season are scurrilous: "Gattuso is going nowhere, he calls the shots – nothing will be done here without his say so."
  • (7) Richard Davenport-Hines in his recently published An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo writes that 1963 was the year when "the soapy scum flowed after the sluices of self-righteous scurrility were opened".
  • (8) Others on the train begin spreading scurrilous rumours that I am travelling in first class, forcing me later to produce my train tickets.
  • (9) The union vowed to ramp up industrial action, including strikes in the autumn over a range of grievances spanning pay, pensions and workload after passing a motion denouncing "scurrilous attacks, abuse, intimidation and lies" and accusing the government of a "vicious assault" on the profession.
  • (10) Rather, it will protect members of the public from the more scurrilous abuses, which in my case resulted in the printing of lies and unfounded allegations.
  • (11) Through the listserv, conference calls were quickly organized among top scientists across the country to discuss how to respond to the news that what was seen as a scurrilous and misleading film was to be given a high-profile airing.
  • (12) I am not a member or even supporter of the Labour party but your scurrilous coverage has convinced me that your paper no longer lives up to the label.
  • (13) The justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke , said: "As the law stands, individuals can be the subject of scurrilous rumour and allegation on the web with little meaningful remedy against the person responsible.
  • (14) "We are instructed to record our clients' complete rejection of the scurrilous allegations made by the applicants in their papers.
  • (15) What about Damian McBride, Brown's shamed spin doctor, sacked for sending an email suggesting planting scurrilous and untrue rumours about members of the opposition?
  • (16) McBride was forced to resign as Brown's head of strategy in 2009 after he sent Draper emails containing scurrilous gossip and lies about Conservative MPs as planning for Red Rag took shape.
  • (17) Whether such scurrilous operations will surface in 2012 might depend on how close the polls are and at present they are tight.
  • (18) Liddle provokes to the brink of apoplexy, but he rarely conceals his views in insidious campaigns of rumour and scurrility.
  • (19) 6.36pm BST 77 min : De Sciglio booked for a scurrilous strategic foul aimed at aborting another Uruguay attack.
  • (20) These days it would be stretching it to suggest that Eastwood's range is quite that broad, his face seemingly fixed in a beatific beam, the sort of blissful countenance that once had him pegged in a scurrilous - and erroneous - piece of showbiz gossip as Stan Laurel's love child.

Sordid


Definition:

  • (a.) Filthy; foul; dirty.
  • (a.) Vile; base; gross; mean; as, vulgar, sordid mortals.
  • (a.) Meanly avaricious; covetous; niggardly.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Haki's naivety about English detective fiction is more than matched by Latimer's ingenuous excitement as Haki describes to him Dimitrios's sordid career, and he decides it would be fun to write the gangster's biography.
  • (2) It might be really sordid and bad sexual etiquette, but whatever else it is, it is not rape or you bankrupt the term rape of all meaning."
  • (3) Scarcely a day goes by without another apology for past failures, another gimmicky new policy, another sordid attempt to grab headlines.
  • (4) A former police officer is less complimentary: "The clientele in these places are by definition pretty sordid, highly manipulative and sleazy," he says.
  • (5) As Margarito and Inez argue over what really happened that day in Culiacan, it seems that they are no longer describing yet another sordid killing in the endless war on drugs.
  • (6) How could any organisation survive the sordid revelations that emerged at the Leveson inquiry, costing the Murdoch empire millions in compensation and legal fees, along with the closure of a flagship title?
  • (7) He recalled the stench and listening to the screams of others echoing through their sordid dungeon.
  • (8) The "titillating details" of the "sordid affairs" of the Anna Nicole saga "enticed" Bahamians and changed the face of the island's politics, two confidential memos sent by the embassy in Nassau reveal.
  • (9) "Of all the sites, it was the most depressing and slightly sordid," she says, "while other places often had an air of melancholy or seemed slightly otherworldly at dawn.
  • (10) Wilde takes no prisoners from the very outset: “The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others.” It’s a very Wildean, quasi-epigrammatic reversal – the reader expects something worthy, collectivist and altruistic, instead he gets something that’s irreverent, individualistic and apparently selfish.
  • (11) To begin with, it was a different kind of image problem: in Georgian society gin was considered rackety and sordid, not fusty and old-fashioned as it was in the swinging 60s.
  • (12) Often only one – and sometimes no – carriage door would open when they pulled into a station, and in summer they were “cooled” only by the methodical sweep of a begrimed metal fan that just pushed the sordid air about.
  • (13) The principle is a simple one: it involves national resources going into education, health and housing, instead of being siphoned off into the offshore accounts of the super-rich or squandered on sordid overseas conflicts, instigated by the inadequate for the profit of their paymasters.
  • (14) In her 1963 novel A Summer Birdcage , Margaret Drabble’s narrator Sarah describes a “loathsome flat” in the King’s Road, Chelsea, and an “unspeakably sordid” place in Highgate.
  • (15) Again, my first instinct is that they must have been rubbernecking, the sordid allegations having made HRH a rather grim sort of draw, or at the very least not as ferociously dull and pointless as the rest of the apres-ski programme .
  • (16) One letter said: "Will some evil person leak the entire proceedings and all the sordid details so that the irresponsible global media … can really get their teeth into them?"
  • (17) Two years ago, in a joint interview with Ruth Rendell, the writers were asked by a Daily Telegraph reporter, "how two respectable, middle-class ladies" could be involved in the "sordid world of crime fiction?"
  • (18) At the same time, the cable adds, the "titillating details of Anna Nicole's sordid affairs have enticed the Bahamian public to give renewed focus to government indiscretions".
  • (19) This is a potentially serious point, seeing as to require any priest to solemnise what he believes to be sordid would be to mandate hypocrisy and thereby demean the prospective services.
  • (20) But the release of three separate reports on Friday; from the Metropolitan police and the NSPCC, the Crown Prosecution Service and from Surrey police, has shed harsh light on what Commander Peter Spindler of Scotland Yard labelled a sordid tale of a larger than figure who had "groomed the nation".