Sardonic vs Factitious - What's the difference?
sardonic | factitious |
Scornfully mocking or cynical.
* Sir H. Wotton
* Burke
Disdainfully or ironically humorous.
Created by humans; artificial.
* 1661 , Robert Lovell, a Compleat History of Animals and Minerals , page
*1854 , Thoreau, Walden ,
*:Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.
*1860 , Emerson, Conduct of life ,
*:Manners are partly factitious , but, mainly, there must be capacity for culture in the blood. Else all culture is vain.
Counterfeit, fabricated, fake.
* 1847 , George Payne Rainsford James, A Whim, and Its Consequences , Chapter XXIV,
*1908 , Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives' Tale ,
*:"Well, mater," he said, in a voice of factitious calm, "I've got it." He was looking up at the ceiling.
*:"Got what?"
*:"The National Scholarship. Swynnerton says it's a sheer fluke. But I've got it. Great glory for the Bursley School of Art!"
* 2008 , Richard L. Hume & Jerry B. Gough, Blacks, Carpetbaggers, and Scalawags: The Constitutional Conventions of Radical Reconstruction , Louisiana State University Press (2008), ISBN 9780807133248,
As adjectives the difference between sardonic and factitious
is that sardonic is scornfully mocking or cynical while factitious is created by humans; artificial.sardonic
English
Adjective
(en adjective)- He distances himself from people with his nasty, sardonic laughter.
- strained, sardonic smiles
- the scornful, ferocious, sardonic grin of a bloody ruffian
factitious
English
Adjective
(en adjective)351
- [...] if from erosion of the gums, by such things as restore them, strengthen and bind them; if wanting'', it may be helped by the factitious ; their ''?ordes are removed, by washing and cleaning them; and their blacknesse, by dentifrices.
page 208:
- To prevent a prisoner's escape, to prevent his suborning testimony, and arranging a factitious tale with those without, may justify many precautions."
page 168:
- Ironically, the most stereotypical myth of Reconstructionism — involving perceived endemic corruption and ruthless exploitation of hapless native whites by freedman and carpetbaggers seeking to gain from black rule — is a factitious story of postwar South Carolina, as told with considerable and lurid exaggeration in two "classic" accounts