• It's a common theme in movies, the American who purges bad feelings by facing danger head on, and director Joe Johnston is clumsy with it.
• The hijackers used fanatical certainty, misplaced religious faith, and dehumanising hatred to purge themselves of the human instinct for empathy.
• The purpose of tragedy is catharsis, a powerful emotional experience in which the audience purges the emotions of pity and fear.

Synonyms

• The film documents the fruit of the Nazi effort to transform human beings into vermin that must be purged as an act of self-defense.
• The Stalinist purges coincided with diplomatic efforts by the Soviet regime to form alliances with the Western bourgeois democracies against fascist Germany.
• Anti-Communist labor leaders were purging Communists from unions, and the labor press was losing its independence.

Synonyms

• She purged the Department of Education's top ranks of educators favoring a traditional pedagogical approach.
• My editorship came to a rather abrupt end after President John F. Kennedy purged the U.S. Civil War Commission's members and staff.
• He was purged from the Republican Clubs / The Workers' Party in 1979 as a ‘disruptive influence’.

Synonyms

• I make it plain it is open to you, Mr Rothschild, to apply to the court, in this court, to purge your contempt.
• But their joy turned to anger after the judge reduced the sentence after agreeing to purge the contempt of court conviction.
• The men were prepared to purge their contempt of court simultaneously with Shell collapsing its injunction against them.

• Although most bulimics purge by vomiting, abuse of laxatives or diuretics also occurs.
• Bulimics purge by vomiting, strict dieting, fasting (not eating), exercising, or by taking laxatives.
• Victims of the plague were treated by blood-letting, purging with laxatives and the lancing of the plague-boils.