What's the difference between subversive and subvert?

Subversive


Definition:

  • (a.) Tending to subvert; having a tendency to overthrow and ruin.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) After heading for Rome with his long-term partner, Howard Auster, he returned to fiction with a bestselling novel, Julian, based on the life of a late Roman emperor; a political novel, Washington DC, based on his own family; and Myra Breckinridge, a subversive satire that examined contradictions of gender and sexuality with enough comic brio to become a worldwide bestseller.
  • (2) In the three cases examined, the panel said that none "represents subversion of the peer review process nor unreasonable attempts to influence the editorial policy of journals".
  • (3) Beijing is furious at the Nobel committee's decision to give the award to Liu, who is serving an 11-year sentence for incitement to subversion for co-authoring Charter 08, an appeal for democratic reforms.
  • (4) Zhou Shifeng, the founder of Beijing’s Fengrui law firm and one of the lawyers at the centre of the crackdown, is accused of “state subversion”.
  • (5) Yet the whole thing was sly and subversive, for it whispered, see, see what you have been missing.
  • (6) It is likely that this process involves subversion of the normal regulatory mechanisms which control expression of proto-oncogenes through the interposition of exogenous, cis-acting enhancer sequences.
  • (7) They were subversive, and they hung out together and watched films.” It meant a lot to her, because until then she had never heard staff talk about the Connor his parents knew and loved.
  • (8) According to state media, he began serving a three-year sentence for subversion last month.
  • (9) His political activism earned him a 10-year jail term for "subversive speech", after which he fled to neighbouring Mozambique to lead guerrilla forces in a protracted war against Ian Smith's government that left 27,000 dead.
  • (10) Where there were pictures of powerful women, the images tended to be subversive: the same photograph of a grimacing Theresa May was used to illustrate three different stories about the home secretary, and two of the three pictures of the German chancellor showed Angela Merkel puffing out her cheeks, looking mildly absurd.
  • (11) One man – Guo Xianliang, an engineer from Yunnan Province – is detained on suspicion of inciting subversion of state power after distributing flyers about Liu and the prize in Guangdong, southern China, the organisation reported.
  • (12) People who are now mainstream politicians were, at their start of their political careers, deemed to be subversive by the Special Branch - to name one: Jack Straw.
  • (13) The "political subversion" consisted of support for those resisting the murderous assaults of the US and its client regimes, and sometimes – horror of horrors – perhaps even providing arms to the victims.
  • (14) O'Brien has since become notorious among equal rights campaigners for his vigorous attacks on gay marriage and gay adoptions , calling homosexuality a "grotesque subversion" and "harmful to the physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing of those involved".
  • (15) Kenton's alliance with Zaleshoff isn't always an easy one - the journalist is unimpressed by the spy's attempt to fob him off with the official Stalinist line on Trotskyite subversion, for example, and Zaleshoff is, not unreasonably, suspicious of Kenton's motives for helping him - but it's kept afloat by the undercurrent of sexual attraction between Kenton and Zaleshoff's sister.
  • (16) Warp's next act of subversion was to wind up Pete Tong by declaring that bleep was dead and that the future of music was "clonk" - the title of Sweet Exorcist's next 12in.
  • (17) "I love the making of a book, I love the clash between commerce and art and the subversive quality of thinking, right, if you talk about this book in a certain way you can get it in people's hands."
  • (18) Microorganisms implement their strategy of persistence by two principal tactics: (1) sabotage of the host's bronchial defenses (ie, direct microbe-mediated damage to the host), and (2) subversion of the host's normally protective defenses into damaging host tissue itself (ie, indirect host-mediated damage provoked by the microbe).
  • (19) The "final definition" of the program recognized that "final success will require decisive US military intervention," after terrorism and subversion had laid the basis.
  • (20) So the battles of the last century that were considered subversive at the time, have largely been won.

Subvert


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To overturn from the foundation; to overthrow; to ruin utterly.
  • (v. t.) To pervert, as the mind, and turn it from the truth; to corrupt; to confound.
  • (v. i.) To overthrow anything from the foundation; to be subversive.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) In such conditions, proposals which subvert fundamental academic principles meet no effective opposition.
  • (2) His reports alleged active, sustained and covert collusion to subvert the election which, if confirmed, could constitute treason.
  • (3) This is the first such virally-encoded soluble cytokine receptor to be identified, and may represent a more general mechanism by which viruses subvert the host immune system.
  • (4) He told the court: “We have been trying at the bar to imagine whether we can think of any other group of legal or natural persons, terrorist suspects, arms dealers, Jews, in respect of whose evidence one might even begin to think that one could tenably say, ‘Well, of course, in looking at this evidence I have been very careful because I know from the past that these people are a bit devious and a bit unworthy, and the only thing they’re really interested in is subverting public health.’ ” Yet last week’s judgment, running to 1,000 paragraphs, confirmed in excoriating detail just how determined big tobacco has been down the decades to achieve precisely this goal.
  • (5) Liu is serving 11 years for incitement to subvert state power after co-writing Charter 08, a call for democratic reforms in China.
  • (6) China is furious at the decision to recognise Liu, jailed for incitement to subvert state power after co-authoring a call for democratic reforms.
  • (7) Mona Deeley, a producer for Cinema Badila: Alternative Cinema on BBC Arabic TV , said: "The secret cinema is an interesting initiative for both subverting the ban on cinema and as a form of civil and cultural resistance."
  • (8) These findings, together with the fact that the worm's gut contains hemosiderin, suggest that the worm subverts the vascular reaction and causes within the nodule a controlled hemorrhage that serves the worm's nutritional needs.
  • (9) No wry observations or whoops-a-daisy trombones to subvert the conceit for period lolz.
  • (10) It claimed to be the minutes of a late 19th-century meeting of Jewish leaders, in which they discussed their goal of a global plan to subvert the morals of gentiles and control the press and the global economy.
  • (11) It was our moment to make our point by subverting the message using the show itself.” In an early meeting with the production team, they were, the statement claims, handed images of “pro-Assad graffiti – apparently natural in a Syrian refugee camp”.
  • (12) The attack on al-Jazeera is part of an assault on free speech to subvert the impact of old and new media in the Arab world.
  • (13) Government inspections of garment factories are infrequent and easily subverted by corruption, and the garment industry, by far Bangladesh's biggest exporter, is highly influential in government.
  • (14) One year later, a court sentenced him to 11 years for incitement to subvert state power.
  • (15) "The bottom line is that we're all unique individuals – even when I'm trying to imitate Mariah, it's still through my lens," she explains when we get on to the subject of subverting pop for the masses.
  • (16) "He repeatedly sacrificed his own interests, even his liberty, in order to defend these values and challenge and subvert the most powerful factions that were their enemies," Greenwald wrote.
  • (17) And particularly once you start splitting them over jurisdictions and things like that it becomes much more difficult to subvert their intentions.
  • (18) We speculate that a major mechanism by which some oncogenes promote metastatic ability is by subverting a signal transduction process, resulting in activation of a set of genes, some of which appear to promote metastatic ability.
  • (19) But Thorne’s working life has been spent subverting genres, through his Bafta-winning work on supernatural thriller The Fades and Shane Meadows’s bleak, beautiful coming-of-age miniseries This Is England ’86 and ’88.
  • (20) His adrenalin-pumping shows are woven into American life, yet subvert its capitalist fundamentals, that innate American principle of screw-thy-neighbour, in favour of what he insists to be "real" America – working class, militant, street-savvy, tough but romantic, nomadic but with roots – compiled into what feels like a single epic but vernacular rock-opera lasting four decades.