(n.) A mingled mass; a confused mixture; a stew of various ingredients; a hodgepodge.
(n.) A blending of property for equality of division, as when lands given in frank-marriage to one daughter were, after the death of the ancestor, blended with the lands descending to her and to her sisters from the same ancestor, and then divided in equal portions among all the daughters. In modern usage, a mixing together, or throwing into a common mass or stock, of the estate left by a person deceased and the amounts advanced to any particular child or children, for the purpose of a more equal division, or of equalizing the shares of all the children; the property advanced being accounted for at its value when given.
Example Sentences:
(1) More than £600m has been spent on the massive universal credit project, intended to replace a hotchpotch of benefits and tax credit topups with a simple, single monthly payment to claimants that would include a "subsidy to work".
(2) As David Cameron prepared to deliver his "aspiration nation" speech to the Conservative conference in Birmingham, 110 miles away in Margaret Thatcher's former constituency a hotchpotch alliance of squatters, retired booksellers, local bloggers and international anti-capitalist activists whooped as a district judge blocked attempts to close a vibrant community library that has popped up in the shell of one controversially closed as part of the Conservative party's most radical experiment yet in shrinking local public services.
(3) The grimy streets of central St Pauli, a rough neighbourhood where sailors once passed their time on shore, are lined with a hotchpotch of trendy bars, clubs and music venues – as well as the handful of seedier establishments which made Hamburg infamous.
(4) The Marwood in The Lanes, for example, is a wonderful hotchpotch of reclaimed bits and pieces with old cupboard doors as table tops and even Apple Mac hard drive towers as stools.
(5) We knew what was required: in cases like ours, to stand any chance of meaningful success, you need a truckload of informational wherewithal, the will to fight, and the money to hire a good lawyer – which, at a stroke, scythes out millions of parents, who are left with only piecemeal help, and hotchpotch provision.
(6) We confront the problem with an unedifying hotchpotch of neuroses and political spasms that ensure we never truly see it in the round, never discuss it rationally and never get to grips with it.
(7) At the heart of every movie, all made on small budgets and drawing on a hotchpotch of British and European money, there has been a cause; from the Spanish civil war ( Land And Freedom ) to the Contra insurgency against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua ( Carla’s Song ), from trade union rights in the US ( Bread And Roses : the only film he has made in North America) to Ireland’s war of independence ( The Wind That Shakes The Barley ) and, most of all, the struggle for work, dignity and justice ( Raining Stones , Sweet Sixteen , It’s A Free World , My Name Is Joe , The Angels’ Share – basically all of them ).
(8) The deputy prime minister admits the plan has failed, blaming the creation of a "hotchpotch of schemes".
(9) Tarantino's genre hotchpotch might have made for something of a soundclash, but its highly entertaining din might be just the clarion call required to shake fresh life into the genre.
(10) Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader, said Brown's statement was "nothing more than a hotchpotch of unrelated Whitehall schemes, a ministerial cut and paste job".
(11) She spent 18 months in the cabinet at the ministry of culture, overseeing a hotchpotch of responsibilities from ballet and broadband to table tennis and tourism.
(12) He, along with his predecessor, is too spineless to stand up for the gay minority, and exposes his church as incapable of living up to the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 1, "all human beings are equal in dignity and rights", and nothing more than a hotchpotch of amoral stone-age superstition.
(13) It was a hotchpotch of a speech, providing neither inspiration nor challenge.
Mishmash
Definition:
(n.) A hotchpotch.
Example Sentences:
(1) Its annual conferences were a mishmash of Highlands conservative women in tartan skirts, angry socialists from the central belt and, unique to the party, an embarrassing array of men in kilts armed with broadswords and invoking the ghosts of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce.
(2) Chelsea may believe they are capable of more than the mishmash they have offered up previously in the aftermath of this win.
(3) In the approach to war, both the US and the UK governments mobilised a mishmash of arguments in a campaign of persuasion that was based not on rigorous analysis of intelligence but on the selective use of data and informants.
(4) The government’s decision to back a third runway at Heathrow has been informed by a mishmash of misinformation and missing information.
(5) This audience included 1.1 million watching the BBC HD simulcast – a frisky figure for a channel that has otherwise struggled to establish itself, featuring as it does a mishmash of programming from all the corporation's TV channels other than BBC1 (which has its own dedicated HD channel).
(6) On one level, Reddit is a mishmash of literally thousands of different communities, all overlapping slightly.
(7) It is otherwise a mishmash of free-market wizardry and global cop role-playing.
(8) I think it is just about one of the most shocking things that I have seen in my lifetime in this country.” At Ukip’s biggest ever conference, held in Ed Miliband’s constituency town of Doncaster, the party unveiled a mishmash of policies designed to appeal to former Labour and former Conservative voters.
(9) ‘This guy is making progress’ O’Malley is a mishmash of a stray Kennedy and the type of policy obsessive who even thinktanks keep locked away in a back office cubicle.
(10) The result isn't the mishmash you'd expect (despite the eccentric dish names).
(11) Momentum is a mishmash of sensibilities but any comparison with Militant is overblown.
(12) In all three acts, Kawase sings in an enticingly awkward mishmash of English and Japanese, sometimes starting a sentence in one language and finishing it in the other.
(13) Like many of the systems set up in the rush to independence, education throughout South Sudan is a mishmash of ideals and the possible.
(14) Underlying the unloved mosaic of contemporary British benefits lurks a mishmash of half-forgotten principles.
(15) It's also an odd mishmash of sensibilities: Depp; Thompson (but not good Thompson); and revivified actor-writer-director Bruce Robinson, who was slowly coaxed out of retirement by Depp himself for the first time since the debacle that was Jennifer 8.
(16) The urban heat island effect (and all its attendant causes, effects, and cause-effect mishmashes ) will expand its reach, for example raising temperatures in the Piedmont region by between 2-6C.
(17) Stagg was fortunate in that the judge in the original case, Mr Justice Ognall, was robust and self-confident enough to see the case against him for what it was – a mishmash of suppositions and mild coincidences, sprinkled with some fanciful psychological speculation.
(18) As part of the debate surrounding the 1988 Education Reform Act, Hull wrote Mishmash (1991), a devastating analysis of the use of food metaphors by rightwing opponents of an inclusive and pluralistic religious education and his work continued to oppose “religionism”, Hull’s term for those protecting themselves from “contamination” from other faiths and worldviews by withdrawing into their own tribalistic enclaves.
(19) The ideas in the original consultation document, which emerged from work in the Centre for Social Justice , were roundly condemned by most authoritative commentators; they had muddled measures, indicators, associations, consequences and risks in a multi-dimensional mishmash, which was almost certainly impossible to deliver, technically or data-wise.
(20) Perhaps only an estate agent could say that about a mishmash of camouflage and country house green.