What's the difference between decrepit and ragtag?
Decrepit
Definition:
(a.) Broken down with age; wasted and enfeebled by the infirmities of old age; feeble; worn out.
Example Sentences:
(1) In 1972, he launched a more ambitious plan by buying Hintlesham Hall, a decrepit grade-11 listed building in Suffolk, converting it into a home and three restaurants and taking over the Hintlesham festival held there.
(2) Some of Rio's most impressive architecture can still be found in and around Praça XV, but it has been throttled by modernity, its colonial charm obliterated by a concrete flyover, now black and decrepit, built directly over the top of it.
(3) Caine’s Guardian reader may be decrepit and disillusioned but still oozes wit and discerning taste.
(4) I really want to say thank you for the kind way my decrepit body was washed; how, in the middle of the night when I felt overwhelmed, a nurse stopped what she was doing and held my hand; the cake covered in Smarties the catering staff brought me for my birthday; the smiles and jokes with the staff to pass the long days; and Mr Burbos (one of the handsome consultant surgeons) who has been so generous with his time and care.
(5) One disingenuous objection to fairer taxing of property pleads for cash-poor, asset-rich old folk rattling around in drafty, decrepit mansions.
(6) This is not because it’s a decrepit, leaking ship, as often depicted, but because every modern healthcare system in the world will always need more money, more research and more beds, to give patients the best chance of treatment.
(7) The latest WHO figures underscore Ebola’s asymmetric spread, as it travels through densely populated communities with decrepit health facilities and poor public awareness campaigns.
(8) The Walworth Farce, which opens at the National Theatre next week, focuses on a tyrannical Irishman who has kept his two sons locked in a decrepit flat since the trio arrived in London almost two decades before.
(9) Another avenue is supporting the decrepit political opposition group that exists.
(10) Particularly striking is the fact that Britain will end up spending less as a proportion of its national income than even the US, the international byword for a decrepit public sector.
(11) They have already been biting the community – one of my children's school is a decrepit building, which was built in the 70s, a mass of concrete with rotten windows and broken doors.
(12) This did not happen overnight, and the sorry conduct of the referendum campaign was only the latest indication of the decrepit state of our politics: dominated by shameless appeals to fear, as though hope were a currency barely worth trading in, the British public had no such thing as a better nature, and a brighter future held no appeal.
(13) This fact, which confirms the decrepitation theorem, could explain the explosion inside the tissues observed in surgical application of the Nd:YAG laser.
(14) But the worst are shikumen s, no matter how historically significant or beautiful, that have become so decrepit and grimy from decades of overcrowding, heavy communal usage and minimal infrastructural investment by residents and local authorities.
(15) Many were in decrepit tower-blocks, sky high and matchstick small.
(16) I have known the squalid, damp bedrooms of the decrepit council house; the wait for the child benefit to buy the next meal; the reality of a bag of chips being a cheaper and more comforting alternative to a nutritious meal; the constant linkage of school to failure throughout our family generations; and the inevitable lure of cigarettes and alcohol to ease the pain.
(17) In tears and confusion, thousands of women, children and old men expelled from Srebrenica poured off buses yesterday at the decrepit air base in the town of Tuzla, northern Bosnia, accusing Serb rebels of murder and rape and the United Nations of indifference during the fall of the enclave.
(18) Earlier this month, more than 600 million people lost power when the country's decrepit electricity grid collapsed .
(19) The debt crisis that erupted in 2009 exposed the decrepit state of the country's structures.
(20) She looked forward to a life beyond the decrepit confines of the capital.
Ragtag
Definition:
Example Sentences:
(1) To Popovich's credit, the ragtag group of roleplayers and benchwarmers almost pulled off a victory.
(2) In addition to the huge number of different groups fighting on the Ukrainian side, there is also a ragtag assortment of people fighting for the separatists – a mixture of Cossack militias and others from Russia who may have links with Russian intelligence, people representing local business and criminal interests, and ideologically motivated locals who genuinely believe in the cause.
(3) Based on Robert Edsel's book, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes , the film focuses on the ragtag group of Americans, played by Clooney, Damon, Murray, Goodman and Bob Balaban, one Brit (Hugh Bonneville – Heslov is a big fan of Downton Abbey) and one Frenchman (Jean Dujardin, who is sweet in the film, even if he clearly only understood about one English word in every five of his lines) who were formed to try to save some of the great works of European art and architecture from being destroyed and pillaged during the second world war.
(4) Something is bubbling under the surface and the ragtag platoon of Ukip activists in Somerset say they feel it too.
(5) That’s where the ragtag bunch of 30 volunteers comes in.
(6) In the centre of town, pockets of armed men in ragtag military gear as well as larger groups of unarmed men congregated.
(7) Coke's critics are largely a ragtag bunch but the company has been unable to drown out the background noise, despite an annual marketing budget of $2bn.
(8) Its ragtag forces, including a high proportion of press-ganged and brutalised children, became notorious for abduction, gang rape and summary execution.
(9) This body is populated by a motley collection of amateurs; leftovers from a bygone age, when Ukip was a ragtag band of volunteers on the fringes of British politics.
(10) But for the first time in the quarter-century since global warming became a major public issue the advantage in this struggle has begun to tilt away from the Exxons and the BPs and towards the ragtag and spread-out fossil fuel resistance, which is led by indigenous people, young people, people breathing the impossible air in front-line communities.
(11) At the moment most of the interventions have been against softer targets – Saudi Arabia targeting guerrillas in Yemen; Egypt against Bedouin in Sinai; or strikes against ragtag armies in Libya.
(12) Even with better weapons and more training, they say, the rebels' ragtag forces are unlikely in the short term to be a match for Gaddafi's men.
(13) Clovis, a professor at Morningside College in Sioux City and occasional talk-radio host, has since been supplemented with a ragtag group of foreign policy advisers recently announced by the campaign, as well as by Stephen Miller, a longtime aide to Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who at campaign rallies has accused Cruz of wanting to start a war with Russia.
(14) Now try to imagine for a moment the excitement of the Cuban people in 1959 when the charismatic barbudo, Fidel Castro, and his band of ragtag rebels managed to pull off the impossible: getting rid of the dictator Fulgencio Batista and ushering in – or so everyone expected – a new era in Cuba; a Cuba free of the corruption, violence and cronyism that had pockmarked its history since before its Wars of Independence, and radically divided the haves and the have-nots.
(15) But my fondest memory is of The Brass Band, a ragtag bunch of American players who performed classical music brilliantly and with no reverence at all.
(16) Lea says the Northern Territory’s struggle for political representation stretches back beyond 1978 to the start of the 20th century and a “ragtag bunch of mostly blokes” who fought hard – but that’s not what Territory Day is about today, she says.
(17) It’s beyond a place called Jalbire but we’ve heard trucks are being looted, so the villagers come to a prearranged spot: a ragtag bunch of old men and small boys who are thrilled to receive a few basic necessities – a tarpaulin each, a packet of biscuits, some thin foam to sleep on.
(18) Each features a larger-than-life warlord and ragtag followers kitted out in mix'n'match uniforms.
(19) The ragtag army can fight a war of attrition with the government, but with no leadership and no command structure, they are unable to organise a concentrated attack on its bases.
(20) Here, a ragtag gang of American soldiers (including C Thomas Howell!)