Respectability vs Decency – What’s the difference?

Respectability vs Decency - What's the difference?
As nouns the difference between respectability and decency is that respectability is the quality of being respectable while decency is the quality of being decent; propriety.

respectability

English

Noun

(en-noun)

  • The quality of being respectable.
  • *
  • *:Such a scandal as the prosecution of a brother for forgery—with a verdict of guilty—is a most truly horrible, deplorable, fatal thing. It takes the respectability‘ out of a family perhaps at a critical moment, when the family is just assuming the robes of ‘ respectability :it is a black spot which all the soaps ever advertised could never wash off.
  • *{{quote-news, year=2012, date=June 19, author=Phil McNulty, work=BBC Sport
  • , title= England 1-0 Ukraine
    , passage=But once again Hodgson’s men found a way to get the result they required and there is a real air of respectability about their campaign even though they had to survive a first-half siege from a Ukraine side desperate for the win they needed to progress.}}

  • The class of respectable people.
  • decency

    English

    Noun

  • the quality of being decent; propriety
  • * Burke
  • Observances of time, place, and of decency in general.
  • * Roscommon
  • Immodest words admit of no defence, / For want of decency is want of sense.
  • That which is proper or becoming.
  • * Atterbury
  • The external decencies of worship.
  • * Milton
  • Those thousand decencies , that daily flow / From all her words and actions.