What's the difference between staid and stolid?

Staid


Definition:

  • (a.) Sober; grave; steady; sedate; composed; regular; not wild, volatile, or fanciful.
  • () of Stay

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The trial, originally expected to be staid, has exposed severe dysfunction within Bo's family and detailed the complicated tangle of allegiances and affairs that led to his downfall .
  • (2) The established format sounds a bit staid until Balding starts discussing it.
  • (3) Recent politically sensitive cases have been staid and straightforward affairs – last month, former railways minister Liu Zhijun was handed a suspended death sentence for bribery after just three and a half hours in the dock.
  • (4) That first book, The Path to Power , was greeted as a revelation not only for its insights into the true nature of Johnson but for its transformation of the staid form of political biography.
  • (5) According to the NetEase report, the rules do not apply to CCTV1, although that may be because its output is already more staid than that of its rivals.
  • (6) Steve Crawshaw, who turned Bradford and Bingley from a staid building society into a specialist in self-certified mortgages and left the company weeks before it had to be nationalised, has apparently retired to the Yorkshire countryside: his only publicly-recorded activity these days is as the chair of the advisory board of the School of Management at Bradford University, who forwarded him my list of questions, but I heard nothing back.
  • (7) I'd seen younger, more erratic and more hyped bands (Young Bloods, Fat White Family) earlier in the day and expected something more staid and predictable.
  • (8) Ryley said: "Whatever you think of Fox News, there is no denying that it has shaken up the sometimes staid world of US TV news by using commentators like Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity alongside its core news output."
  • (9) Why had investment bankers been allowed to over-run a supposedly staid Scottish bank?
  • (10) Even the usually staid weekly, Die Zeit, headlines its main Greek crisis story with the headline: "Are the Greeks Potty?"
  • (11) The prostaglandin-E2-concentrations in the treated pregnant animals decreased by half during the first hour of the experiment, whereas they staid fairly constant in the untreated group of animals.
  • (12) As well as being the first black minister, Gething is seen as part of a new generation of younger politicians who will regenerate the Welsh assembly, which is sometimes criticised for being staid and lacking dynamism.
  • (13) She points to a pirate outfit in the exhibition worn by Adam Ant (another snake-hips) and links it deftly to the piecrust collar worn by Lady Diana Spencer when she first came to public notice as a sweet and rather staid nursery teacher in 1980.
  • (14) A Shanghai newspaper learned of her groundbreaking research and "called for an end to the madness" in an editorial comment subsequently republished by the People's Daily – in what would have been an astonishing move for the staid official Communist party newspaper.
  • (15) These tools are also being used to replace staid development paradigms, by organising and developing African-driven institutions.
  • (16) But that's not the only problem at the company: sudden reorganizations and changing strategies favored hot copycat products and left its staid legacy businesses orphaned.That, in turn, left Microsoft marooned between a fading past and an uncertain future.
  • (17) As if to underline the idea that politics in Wales defies the staid norms of Westminster, both front-runners in the Plaid leadership contest are women.
  • (18) The move was designed to transform its image from staid telecoms company into a 21st-century multimedia business.
  • (19) Bannon was casual with open-collared shirt, Priebus more staid in suit and tie.
  • (20) Staid courtyards winced to the sounds of Beggars Banquet, The White Album, Big Pink and Dr John The Night Tripper drifting through leaded windows.

Stolid


Definition:

  • (a.) Hopelessly insensible or stupid; not easily aroused or excited; dull; impassive; foolish.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The rhythm section is strong: occasionally stolid, always solid and sometimes – in particular on their career highpoint, the extraordinary "damn you, England" rant called "The Queen is Dead" – totally inspired.
  • (2) The menu is stolidly British – tea and biscuits, fish and chips and club sandwiches are favourites.
  • (3) As the Ohio State University climatologist Lonnie G Thompson, a world-renowned specialist on glacier melt, explained in 2010 , “Climatologists, like other scientists, tend to be a stolid group.
  • (4) He saw the new forces of educational selection in postwar Britain as yielding a new "restless elite", a creative minority rising above "the stolid majority".
  • (5) He arrived in office with the image of a stolid traditionalist, suffered some early wounding setbacks but emerged at the end of it as a pioneering campaigner in partnership with one of the most glamorous film stars on the planet.
  • (6) Ray (2004) The late Ray Charles is conjured up in all his playful, lustful, anguished glory in this otherwise stolid, respectful biopic of the legendary musician.
  • (7) To our left sat a stolid middle-aged black couple in the Mad Hatter attire that has become part of the South African football fan's kit.
  • (8) While Lessing's brother, Harry settled into a life of stolid conformity, she rebelled, graduating from a junior school run by nuns who had been out in the sun too long, to a high school which she left when she was 14.
  • (9) 58 min: Holland are looking stolid and unimaginative.
  • (10) 3.36am GMT 56 mins The lack of the overlapping full backs (Scott is no Yedlin) is beginning to make Seattle look a little stolid trying to play through this narrow Portland midfield.
  • (11) One by one, our equivocal hero seeks out the runaways: worldly-wise Zhora (Joanna Cassidy); stolid Leon (Brion James); the “pleasure-model” Pris ( Daryl Hannah ); and the group’s apparent leader, the ultimate Nietzschean blond beast, Roy Batty (the wonderful Rutger Hauer).
  • (12) The Guardian Review book club boasts a distinguished history of literary guests, but only Lessing achieved the distinction of a spontaneous standing ovation upon entering the room, a tiny figure dressed entirely in black, stolid as a carved deity.
  • (13) But Rjukan itself, until then, was stolidly unimpressed.
  • (14) When he comes back from the effects of a heart attack in his garden, it is with inner sensation – "an audible pop in the ears" – and a kind of self-spectatorship: "a rich consciousness of solitude, and a feeling of love and admiration for this big stolid body I was in".
  • (15) Led by the passionate Charles Parnell , and then by the stolid John Redmond , the Irish Parliamentary party’s obstructionism and filibusters won many reforms for Ireland.
  • (16) One kind morning I got myself to a meeting with a marvellous occupational therapist, Nicky deCourcy, who stolidly laid out a few facts, among them the detail that I wouldn't be able to cope for a while with more than two extraneous interventions – quiet TV plus reading, say, or radio plus writing – and that sudden urgent sounds would send me, in the medical terminology, a bit wacko.
  • (17) Now, Germans practise the stolid virtues of thrift and moderation we once thought our own, while the British, who once abhorred debt, have become a nation of maniacal spendthrifts.
  • (18) Orwell never explains why the stolid old Anglo-Saxon should be any more "clear" than such newfangled horrors; as "predict" and "extraneous" demonstrate now, words minted from the classical will very rapidly seem entirely normal.
  • (19) I was convinced that, for all its Thatcherite ugliness and excess, there was something about the UK's gritty liveliness that would leave the stolid Germans behind.
  • (20) By allowing TV cameras to broadcast the coronation at Westminster Abbey live to millions of her citizens the Queen transformed a stolid state ceremony into a national celebration.