(n.) A sudden descent from rank or state, reputation or happiness; destruction; ruin.
Example Sentences:
(1) "The Mayans couldn't even predict their own downfall, could they?"
(2) The trial, originally expected to be staid, has exposed severe dysfunction within Bo's family and detailed the complicated tangle of allegiances and affairs that led to his downfall .
(3) The imposition of a poll tax on the Scots in 1989 contributed to Margaret Thatcher's downfall and all but wiped out Scottish Toryism.
(4) Mal Brough has vowed to stare down calls to resign over his role in the downfall of the former speaker Peter Slipper as the Labor party seeks to build pressure on Malcolm Turnbull for backing the special minister of state.
(5) Vladimir Putin painted a colourful picture of Russia's protesters on Thursday, describing them as agents of the west, attending useless demonstrations with condoms pinned to their chests as they sought the downfall of the motherland.
(6) Martin Kyrle, 79, a former mayor of Eastleigh and an active member of the Liberal Democrat party for 55 years, attributes Huhne's downfall to "a personal flaw.
(7) The 2012 rebellion was partly an unintended consequence of Muammar Gaddafi's downfall in Libya.
(8) Zhao, who was kept under intense surveillance at his home after his downfall and whose excursions and visitors were vetted, recorded his memoirs in such secrecy that even family members were unaware of his project.
(9) 'No,' he said with his usual solemn deliberation, 'it was the downfall of a great people and a great civilisation.'
(10) As ruthless as Liverpool were with their finishing, in particular the irrepressible Luis Suárez , who scored twice to take his tally for the season to 22, Stoke were guilty of some calamitous defending and contributed largely to their own downfall.
(11) More than 15 million Egyptians have signed a petition calling for the president's downfall, furious at Morsi's unilateralism and impatient at plummeting living standards.
(12) It never does | Lenore Taylor Read more Jamie Briggs resigned as the minister for cities and the built environment after “inappropriate” conduct towards a staffer during an official visit to Hong Kong and Mal Brough stood aside as special minister of state pending a police investigation into his alleged role in the downfall of Peter Slipper.
(13) Nokia's downfall came about because its Symbian smartphone software was awash with redundancy and complexity.
(14) Thatcher secured her position over more than a decade in power through a brutal belief in her own outlook, a belief that became sclerotic, and led to her downfall.
(15) Mal Brough faces fresh parliamentary pressure over his role in the downfall of the former speaker Peter Slipper , after his attempt to walk away from a key admission was undermined by 60 Minutes releasing the unedited interview exchange.
(16) Macmillan and Thatcher paid with their jobs for being too brutal; Blair's downfall at the hands of Brown's acolytes was, to some extent at least, a consequence of him not being brutal enough.
(17) Today Luzhkov named Medvedev's press secretary, Natalia Timakova, and a Kremlin ideologist, Vladislav Surkov, as plotters of his downfall.
(18) The downfall of Sepp Blatter and the disgraced Fifa president’s one-time heir apparent, Michel Platini , is all but complete after both were banned from football for eight years by the world governing body’s own ethics committee.
(19) An early example of such alteration was the conversion to desert of the rich Tigris and Euphrates valleys through erosion and salt accumulation resulting from faulty irrigation practices that caused the downfall of the great Mesopotamian civilization.
(20) When asked if studio Fox were bothered by this he claimed: “They never said anything!” Despite his new project, Emmerich believes that “sequels are the downfall of films”.
Jeremiad
Definition:
(n.) Alt. of Jeremiade
Example Sentences:
(1) Trump's campaign manager Corey Lewandowski will not face battery charges Read more In a jeremiad against political correctness redolent of his future employer, Miller writes that “politically correct dictates are anathema to American values”.
(2) When I asked my friend the professor of gender studies about all this stuff some time ago (I know this sounds like the overture to a joke, but it isn't), I was semi-secretly hoping for a jeremiad on the wickedness of princess-mania, and tips on how she'd saved her daughters from it.Actually, she said, one of hers had that obsession too, for a bit – but that other obsessions came along to supplant them.
(3) What few of us realised at the time was that Osborne, while endorsing most of Jimmy’s jeremiads, also had a sneaking sympathy for his father-in-law, Colonel Redfern, an upper-class relic of the Raj.
(4) He quotes the jeremiads of self-styled Red Tory Phillip Blond about Britain having become a bipolar nation in which a bureaucratic, centralised state presides over a fragmented, disempowered and isolated citizenry.