What's the difference between servant and vassal?

Servant


Definition:

  • (n.) One who serves, or does services, voluntarily or on compulsion; a person who is employed by another for menial offices, or for other labor, and is subject to his command; a person who labors or exerts himself for the benefit of another, his master or employer; a subordinate helper.
  • (n.) One in a state of subjection or bondage.
  • (n.) A professed lover or suitor; a gallant.
  • (v. t.) To subject.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) There was also acknowledgement for two long-term servants to the men’s game who will both leave the Premier League for Major League Soccer this summer.
  • (2) The Dacre review panel, which included Sir Joseph Pilling, a retired senior civil servant, and the historian Prof Sir David Cannadine, said Britain now had one of the "less liberal" regimes in Europe for access to confidential government papers and that reform was needed to restore some trust between politicians and people.
  • (3) I am one of those retired civil servants who has not received my pension.
  • (4) Senior civil servant Simon Case joined the UK’s EU embassy in March to lead work on the new partnership with the bloc, but EU diplomats are unsure how he fits into the picture.
  • (5) The report was addressed personally to Farr and says it is not to be seen by civil servants, only by him, ministers and their special advisers.
  • (6) "Public servants did nothing to cause the slump but are being asked to bear an unfair share of the burden.
  • (7) So sensitive is the case that Hunt, his civil servants and advisers are expected to rebuff any external lobbying – so they can base their judgement only on a analysis of the public interest issues raised by the proposed deal that was completed by media regulator Ofcom today.
  • (8) A series of reports, written by civil servants and approved by ministers, will be published from the spring of next year until 2014 to examine the impact of everything from directives to the European Court of Justice.
  • (9) Here, the balance of power is clear: the master is dominating the servant – and not the other way around, as is the case with Google Now and the poor.
  • (10) Unions warned it could lead to a system where civil servants were loyal to their political masters rather than the taxpayer.
  • (11) Similar measurements were made in subjects with essential hypertension (77 white and 23 black), and 48 healthy normotensive white civil servants.
  • (12) You've just joined Twitter – why would you recommend it to other civil servants?
  • (13) Public servants who loved their useful work find only a few hours waiting on tables.
  • (14) The package included pay rises for civil servants and security personnel.
  • (15) "There are idle MPs with no outside interests and there are fantastic public servants that do have them."
  • (16) Helena writes: Ilias Iliopoulos, a leading figure at ADEDY, Greece's union of civil servants, has just told me: “This is a warning to the government not to pass the measures.Today was a huge success as witnessed by all those in the armed forces and police who also participated because they, too, will be affected by these cuts.
  • (17) Because for more than a year, he had bent the rules, constantly and persistently, in the face of warnings from his most senior civil servants?
  • (18) The public servants’ ethos, their attachment to the civic realm, has been systematically trashed as mere unionised self-interest.
  • (19) It blamed "confrontation maniacs" for "[making their] servants of conservative media let loose a whole string of sophism intended to hatch all sorts of dastardly wicked plots and float misinformation".
  • (20) The current authors explored this issue in a cohort of 18,274 male civil servants, among whom there were 1,282 cancer deaths over 18-20 years of follow-up.

Vassal


Definition:

  • (n.) The grantee of a fief, feud, or fee; one who holds land of superior, and who vows fidelity and homage to him; a feudatory; a feudal tenant.
  • (n.) A subject; a dependent; a servant; a slave.
  • (a.) Resembling a vassal; slavish; servile.
  • (v. t.) To treat as a vassal; to subject to control; to enslave.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) A eurozone nakedly dominated by one state, Germany, enforcing destructive austerity on its vassals with such brutality, can have no enduring legitimacy.
  • (2) Data previously obtained (Tartakoff, A.M., and P. Vassalli.
  • (3) Does it occur to you that this process is totalitarian and that you behave as if the hundreds of thousands of teachers, parents, students and academics involved in education are your vassals?
  • (4) Another significant reason that Kenyan forces may be trying to create in Somalia a vassal state – or "buffer zone", as the Kenyan government prefers to call it – is to protect its own projects.
  • (5) The disputed subtropical archipelago lies between Japan and Taiwan, and in the course of its history was a vassal state of China , paying tribute for years before coming under Japanese sovereignty.
  • (6) They pointed out that the kingdom had previously been a Chinese vassal state, adding that the ruling Qing dynasty had been too weak to resist Japan's advance.
  • (7) He said such a situation would fail to give the sovereignty over laws and borders that people wanted through the leave vote, he said, adding: “To adopt the Norwegian situation would be to become a vassal state, because you actually end up paying money into the EU budget but you have less control over the regulations than you do now with a seat round the table.” The question of the single market is opening up another potential divide for Labour after Corbyn also insisted the UK would have to leave the grouping when Brexit takes place.
  • (8) Farm subsidies are the 21st century equivalent of feudal aid: the taxes medieval vassals were forced to pay their lords for the privilege of being sat upon.
  • (9) Gardiner also used the interview to claim that the UK would become a “vassal state” if it tried to replicate Norway, which has unfettered access to single market through its membership of the European Economic Area.
  • (10) The party believed Scotland was theirs for keeps, that voters could go nowhere else (whoops); and, in turn, Westminster Labour saw Scottish Labour as its vassal, too.
  • (11) We now want to focus also on cultural tourism, valorising our archaeological sites like Carthage, El Jam and the Bardo National Museum, where the richest collection of Roman mosaics in the world is kept.” Much of the compound was designed by and for the Beys, vassal-kings who ruled the area on behalf of the Ottoman empire from the early 18th century.
  • (12) Measurements of leukocyte enzymes confirm the findings of Vassalli et al.
  • (13) It wasn't all wrath and fury – although Putin made sure to point out that the US feared Russia's geographical size and its nuclear arsenal and "didn't want allies, but vassals".
  • (14) Here, Benedita Rocha, Pierre Vassalli and Delphine Guy-Grand discuss the rules of selection of extrathymic T cells, assess the possible role of these cells in the defence of epithelial integrity and their potential role in autoimmune disease.
  • (15) Editors, two of whose journalists had been jailed at the time of the scandal concerning the Soviet spy John Vassall, were reluctant to cross the Macmillan government again.
  • (16) The participants include not just practicing architects – such as the French duo Lacaton & Vassal, masterminds of the barely-there Palais de Tokyo in Paris – but also artists (like Pedro Reyes) and hybrid outfits such as the Turner Prize-nominated collective Assemble.
  • (17) Several cell types display binding sites for [125I]urokinase (Vassalli, J.-D., D. Baccino, D. Belin.