(v. t. & i.) To shift from one side of a vessel to the other; -- said of the boom of a fore-and-aft sail when the vessel is steered off the wind until the sail fills on the opposite side.
Example Sentences:
Vacillation
Definition:
(n.) The act of vacillating; a moving one way and the other; a wavering.
Example Sentences:
(1) Significant associations were found in the relationship of suicide potential to verbal attack by spouse (p = .03), vacillation in the last two weeks (p = .02), and vacillation since the first serious discussion of divorce (p = .02).
(2) On reversed sequences they vacillated between reproducing the events as modeled and "correcting" them to canonical order.
(3) Culture conditions may provide an environment that permits proliferating glial cells to vacillate in their selection of a specific lineage.
(4) Trump had criticised Obama for vacillation and weakness.
(5) Relations between the White House and Congress have vacillated between close coordination one moment and leaving the other in the dark the next.
(6) Traditionally, NGOs vacillate between guilt and hope in their communications.
(7) Stuck between the cultist Friends of Radio 3 and Global Radio’s sprightly three-times-the-size Classic FM, the network vacillates between populist copying and public service broadcasting stodge.
(8) When first confronted by Arab political revolutions, Britain vacillated, reluctant to abandon useful and grubby friendship with corrupt regimes.
(9) Later she acquiesced in Ronald Reagan's decision to bomb Gaddafi, and famously told George Bush senior not to go wobbly on her as he vacillated over ousting Saddam's forces, which had invaded Kuwait.
(10) Chancellor George Osborne has made it even harder for small businesses to compete against multinationals by cutting the corporate tax rate, and presided over a collapse in business investment, particularly in the hugely promising 'green sector', which has suffered hugely from the government's inept vacillating on energy policy.
(11) He isn't, as Miliband is accused of being, weak, vacillating, unadventurous and academic.
(12) Much of his work in the last half of his life, and much of his continuing happiness, was inspired by Penny the second, whose enormous strengths of decency and determination creatively challenged his own vacillation and reluctance to make moral judgments.
(13) As one works through the stressful event, the victim vacillates between intrusion and avoidance, with the magnitude of those oscillations being much stronger at first.
(14) Major procedures included object permanence, vacillation, memory for locations and pictures, and reaction to unfamiliar adults and to separation.
(15) In Study 2, conducted four-months after Study 1, stable pairs (20 maintained mutual, MM) and vacillating ones (six growing mutual, GM; 11 decayed mutual, DM) were selected.
(16) Mitt Romney has expressed qualified concern about climate change over the years, and then vacillated about how much of it is human-caused and whether we should try to do anything about it.
(17) In the space of just a few weeks Moscow has been making the weather on the crisis – by seizing the initiative where the US and others have vacillated and failed.
(18) The cast of The Five vacillated between feigned solemnity and jocular NFL pregame oafishness.
(19) Most patients showed little denial throughout the period of observation, but more vulnerable patients tended to vacillate between denial and acceptance.
(20) Gerwig played the vacillating temptress in Hannah Takes the Stairs , the long-distance lover in Nights and Weekends , a jittery scream queen in the Duplass brothers’ Baghead .