Sordid vs Expedient - What's the difference?
sordid | expedient |
Dirty or squalid.
Morally degrading.
* 1912 ,
Grasping.
Simple, easy, or quick; convenient.
* Bible, John xvi. 7
* Whately
Governed by self-interest, often short-term self-interest.
* 1861 , John Stuart Mill,
(obsolete) Quick; rapid; expeditious.
* Shakespeare
A method or means for achieving a particular result, especially when direct or efficient; a resource.
* 1906 , O. Henry, :
* 2009 , (Diarmaid MacCulloch), A History of Christianity , Penguin 2010, page 709:
As an adjective sordid
is dirty or squalid.As a noun expedient is
expedient.As a verb expedient is
.sordid
English
Adjective
(en adjective)- He rode slowly home along the deserted road, watching the stars come out in the clear violet sky.They flashed softly into the limpid heavens, like jewels let fall into clear water. They were a reproach, he felt, to a sordid world.
Synonyms
* See alsoDerived terms
* sordidity * sordidly * sordidnessAnagrams
*expedient
English
Adjective
(en adjective)- Most people, faced with a decision, will choose the most expedient option.
- It is expedient for you that I go away.
- Nothing but the right can ever be expedient , since that can never be true expediency which would sacrifice a greater good to a less.
- But the Expedient', in the sense in which it is opposed to the Right, generally means that which is ' expedient for the particular interest of the agent himself; as when a minister sacrifices the interests of his country to keep himself in place.
- His marches are expedient to this town.
Noun
(en noun)- He would never let her know that he was aware of the strange expedient to which she had been driven by her great distress.
- Depressingly, [...] the expedient of importing African slaves was in part meant to protect the native American population from exploitation.
