Cynosure vs Cynical - What's the difference?
cynosure | cynical |
Ursa Minor or Polaris, the North Star, used as a guide by navigators.
(figuratively) That which serves to guide or direct; a guiding star.
Something that is the center of attention; an object that serves as a focal point of attraction and admiration.
*1852 , (Alice Cary), Clovernook, or Recollections of our Neighborhood in the West :
*:The rooms were brilliant with lights and flowers, and gaiety and beauty, and intellect; and the lately shrinking country girl was the cynosure of all eyes---the most envied, the most dreaded, the most admired, the most loved.
*2002 , , The Great Nation , Penguin 2003, p. 306:
*:With anglophobia driving out anglophilia, the king – as during the Seven Years War – came to represent the very cynosure of patriotic zeal.
Of or relating to the belief that human actions are motivated only or primarily by base desires or selfishness.
*(Samuel Johnson) (1709-1784)
*:I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligations where no benefit has been received.
Skeptical of the integrity, sincerity, or motives of others.
Bitterly or jadedly distrustful or contemptuous; mocking.
*
*:He seldom talked, and when he did, it was usually to make some cynical remark-for instance, he would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies.
Showing contempt for accepted moral standards by one's actions.
*
*:When he, at Neergard's cynical suggestion, had consented to exploit his own cluband had consented to resign from it to do so, he had every reason to believe that Neergard meant to either mulct them heavily or buy them out. In either case, having been useful to Neergard, his profits from the transaction would have been considerable.
Like the actions of a snarling dog.
:
As a noun cynosure
is ursa minor or polaris, the north star, used as a guide by navigators.As an adjective cynical is
of or relating to the cynics, a sect of ancient greek philosophers who believed virtue to be the only good and self-control to be the only means of achieving virtue.cynosure
English
Noun
(en noun)- let faith be your cynosure to walk by