Futility vs Uselessness - What's the difference?
futility | uselessness |
(uncountable) The quality of being futile or useless.
(countable) Something, especially an act, that is futile.
*{{quote-book, year=1803, author=Thomas Jefferson, title=Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson, chapter=, edition=
, passage=But fashion and authority apart, and bringing Plato to the test of reason, take from him, his sophisms, futilities , and incomprehensibilities, and what remains? }}
*1843 , '', book 3, chapter XIII, ''Democracy
*{{quote-book, year=1919, author=F. Scott Fitzgerald, title=This Side of Paradise, chapter=, edition=
, passage=But men will chatter and you and I will still shout our futilities to each other across the stage until the last silly curtain falls plump! upon our bobbing heads. }}
* {{quote-news, year=2009, date=September 5, author=Robert Clark, title=Exhibition preview: Goya: Fantasies, Follies And Disasters, Manchester, work=Guardian
, passage=There are moments of profound existential angst, howls of despair at the absurd futilities of war and a sneering disgust at the soul-destroying wastage of human potential. }}
(uncountable) Unimportance.
As nouns the difference between futility and uselessness
is that futility is (uncountable) the quality of being futile or useless while uselessness is the quality of being useless.futility
English
Noun
(en-noun)- His taking the bar exam for a third time was pure futility .
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- No man oppresses thee, can bid thee fetch or carry, come or go, without reason shewn. […] No man, wiser, unwiser, can make thee come or go: but thy own futilities , bewilderments, thy false appetites for Money, Windsor Georges and such like?
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