What's the difference between fritter and tinker?

Fritter


Definition:

  • (v. t.) A small quantity of batter, fried in boiling lard or in a frying pan. Fritters are of various kinds, named from the substance inclosed in the batter; as, apple fritters, clam fritters, oyster fritters.
  • (v. t.) A fragment; a shred; a small piece.
  • (v. t.) To cut, as meat, into small pieces, for frying.
  • (v. t.) To break into small pieces or fragments.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) In an interview with the Qingdao Morning Post, one man lamented how in recent years his wife had frittered away 130,000 yuan (£13,500) of their hard-earned savings on Double Eleven purchases – thus dashing their dreams of buying a new home.
  • (2) Start with pasteis de bacalhau , Portugal’s legendary cod fritters.
  • (3) Three convenience products--frozen, precooked chicken apple fritters, chicken breast fillets, and chicken patties--provided by one processor were subjectively evaluated by two taste panels of older adults, ranging in age from the sixties to middle eighties.
  • (4) Just as at Newcastle United last month , points had been frittered away.
  • (5) When a lost boy meets a rusty child who teaches him to chomp iron bars, or a disgruntled crowd is distracted by beancurd fritters, Mo insists that everything lags behind the belly.
  • (6) There's a stall devoted to petits farcis (stuffed vegetables) and another selling fresh courgette fritters.
  • (7) Like many women, when I had my first child I frittered it away on nappies, food and school trips.
  • (8) Later, he would fritter away a large part of his fortune on never-realised projects such as a theme park dedicated to racial harmony.
  • (9) Their candidate, Mike Thornton, presented the authority with an "invoice for wasteful spending", claiming it had frittered away millions on advertising, office furniture and consultancy fees.
  • (10) Skivers, on the other hand, are lazy, unreliable and manipulative, choosing to live at others' expense so that they can sleep, watch television, abuse various substances and fritter away their time.
  • (11) The Tap Room restaurant next door serves robust Irish dishes such as rolled pork belly with Clonakilty black pudding fritters, champ, kale and Armagh cider jus.
  • (12) While the president stuffs his bank accounts and his spendthrift son fritters away a fortune on flash cars, more than half his people lack access to safe water, child survival rates are reportedly falling and numbers of children receiving primary education dropping.
  • (13) Instead of frittering away billions of dollars on $5 a week tax cuts for above average income earners, we should use that money for schools, hospitals and infrastructure.
  • (14) Noélia is a seriously good chef who serves updated Portuguese classics such as octopus fritters with coriander rice.
  • (15) Grey loves her way with courgettes (grated, to be made into fritters) and her gratin dauphinois.
  • (16) As is was already in the past, the society is nowadays again a place of scientific meeting and postgraduate medical training, whereby it has retained its traditional progressive and interdisciplinary character and will be understood as the uniting tie for the whole medicine which now tends to frittering.
  • (17) Science has demonstrated that each skylark needs to find the equivalent of 200 grains of wheat a day to survive cold weather, but here they were apparently frittering away their energy.
  • (18) He frittered away shots with successive three-putts on 10 and 11 before failing to take advantage, unlike Scott, on the two par fives that followed.
  • (19) 2 Heat a frying pan on a medium heat, pour a little oil into it and, when hot, spoon in small fritters.
  • (20) But they are just frittering it away on Flame Towers and Eurovision and the European Games.” If the Olympics and the World Cup are the top targets for ambitious rulers looking to make their mark, then beneath them sit cascading tiers of other sporting events that are increasingly sold either as an opportunity to put a country on the map or a stepping stone to landing one of the bigger fish.

Tinker


Definition:

  • (n.) A mender of brass kettles, pans, and other metal ware.
  • (n.) One skilled in a variety of small mechanical work.
  • (n.) A small mortar on the end of a staff.
  • (n.) A young mackerel about two years old.
  • (n.) The chub mackerel.
  • (n.) The silversides.
  • (n.) A skate.
  • (n.) The razor-billed auk.
  • (v. t.) To mend or solder, as metal wares; hence, more generally, to mend.
  • (v. i.) To busy one's self in mending old kettles, pans, etc.; to play the tinker; to be occupied with small mechanical works.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) For further education, this would be my priority: a substantial increase in funding and an end to tinkering with the form of qualifications and bland repetition of the “parity of esteem” trope.
  • (2) "We should be working out how it should be ended, rather than tinkering around the edges."
  • (3) The transport secretary, Philip Hammond, indicated that the government had no appetite for the kind of structural tinkering that broke up British Rail and rushed the system into private ownership in the 1990s.
  • (4) Tinker with the tax treatment of the elderly and prepare to be accused of imposing a "granny tax" .
  • (5) He also says that continual tinkering with pension rules by successive governments could deter people from investing in pensions.
  • (6) As the global financial crisis deepens, the rich nations will be forced to recognise that their problems cannot be solved by tinkering with a system that is constitutionally destined to fail.
  • (7) The pre-briefing we’re seeing, tinkering with schedules, now going on about pay, it’s very, very threatening to an institution that’s loved, [even one] that needs to reform.” Jeremy Hunt was the last culture minister to try to increase NAO oversight at the BBC, in 2010.
  • (8) Jean-Claude Juncker , the European commission president, told the Guardian in December that Cameron could tinker with British law on social security and migrant rights, but that enshrining discrimination in EU law was a no-go area.
  • (9) The tinkering with the tort system following the 1975 malpractice crisis will not ease the constantly increasing cost burden on the health care delivery system.
  • (10) At the very least, it would seem to be tinkering with the formula of the biggest spiritual brand in the world, analogous to Coca-Cola changing its famous recipe in 1985 .
  • (11) ET 10 min: Am I the only person who found Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy interminably dull?
  • (12) Happily, there are suddenly more alternatives, indies, blended play and new tech enabled hybrids, toys that encourage tinkering, making and individuality.
  • (13) This suggests that Labour’s answer to Ukip cannot be purely tactical or about tinkering with policy.
  • (14) The existence of multiple neuronal representations of sensory information and multiple circuits for the control of behavioral responses should provide the necessary freedom for evolutionary tinkering and the invention of new designs.
  • (15) Even after the Daily Mail's Jack Tinker (obituary, October 29 1996) contrived for Shulman's career as a theatre critic to be brought to an end in 1991, he continued to write a column for the Evening Standard on art affairs - until he was 83.
  • (16) The Tasmanian Liberal premier, Will Hodgman, opposed “tinkering” with the system.
  • (17) His personal favourite is probably his own 1926 vintage Bentley, and he admits to being in seventh heaven tinkering "to a fault" with any old engine he can get his hands on.
  • (18) I think a lot of the things they publish tinker on racism and Islamophobia … but at the same time I think they have a right to do what they do.
  • (19) But if these opportunities are squandered because tinkering at the edges seems safer than radical reform, we will have failed every future rape victim.
  • (20) The sounds he discovered on his guitar, refined during hours of solitary tinkering in his home studio, adorned records by Elvis Presley, Hank Williams and thousands of other artists, both country and pop.