Comeuppance vs Null - What's the difference?
comeuppance | null |
A negative outcome which is justly deserved.
* 1883 , Albion Winegar Tourgée, ed., The Continent; an illustrated weekly magazine , v 3.
* 1918 , , ch 10.
* 1958', “Yankee '''Comeuppance in a Lousy Inning”, in '' , v 45, n 15 (October 13), p 34.
* 2004 , Peter Hunt, Sheila G. Bannister Ray, eds., International Companion Encyclopedia of Children's Literature , p 862.
* '>citation
A non-existent or empty value or set of values.
Zero]] quantity of [[expression, expressions; nothing.
Something that has no force or meaning.
(computing) the ASCII or Unicode character (), represented by a zero value, that indicates no character and is sometimes used as a string terminator.
(computing) the attribute of an entity that has no valid value.
One of the beads in nulled work.
(statistics) null hypothesis
Having no validity, "null and void"
insignificant
* 1924 , Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove :
absent or non-existent
(mathematics) of the null set
(mathematics) of or comprising a value of precisely zero
(genetics, of a mutation) causing a complete loss of gene function, amorphic.
As nouns the difference between comeuppance and null
is that comeuppance is a negative outcome which is justly deserved while null is zero, nil; the cardinal number before einn.comeuppance
English
Alternative forms
* comeupanceNoun
(en noun)- So when Brown's second wife turned out a reg'lar ternygrunt, I wa'n't in no wise upset, for he needed a comeuppance , an' he got it in her.
- The Sunday edition of the principal morning paper even expressed some bitterness under the heading, "Gilded Youths of the Fin-de-Siecle"--this was considered the knowing phrase of the time, especially for Sunday supplements--and there is no doubt that from certain references in this bit of writing some people drew the conclusion that Mr. George Amberson Minafer had not yet got his comeuppance , a postponement still irritating.
- The Yankees got their comeuppance in Milwaukee when the Braves piled up a record score for the first inning of a World Series game.
- in the anonymous A New Gift for Children (1750), perhaps America's first secular storybook, and its tales of children who are good and merit rewards, and tales of children who are otherwise and receive their comeuppances .
Usage notes
A comeuppance is invariably a bad experience. Even so, some dictionaries leave open the possibility of a positive outcome, either explicitly in the definition or by using synonyms such as (just deserts), which can be positive.Synonyms
* (outcome that is justly deserved) just desertsnull
English
Noun
(en noun)- (Francis Bacon)
- Since no date of birth was entered for the patient, his age is null .
Adjective
(en adjective)- In proportion as we descend the social scale our snobbishness fastens on to mere nothings which are perhaps no more null than the distinctions observed by the aristocracy, but, being more obscure, more peculiar to the individual, take us more by surprise.