What's the difference between patchwork and ragtag?
Patchwork
Definition:
(n.) Work composed of pieces sewed together, esp. pieces of various colors and figures; hence, anything put together of incongruous or ill-adapted parts; something irregularly clumsily composed; a thing putched up.
Example Sentences:
(1) But this is how we live even before we are forced, through penury to claim: fine dining on stewed leftovers, nursing our one drink on those rare social events, cutting our own hair, patchwork-darned clothes and leaky shoes.
(2) They have evolved as a patchwork of other types of institutions and as yet have no clear value system of their own.
(3) Wearing a white dress, black jacket and patent leather sandals, and clutching her mobile phone and keys, she could be on her way to an office in one of the capital's new skyscrapers, instead of walking past a patchwork of bean and sweet potato fields en route to the village's tin-roofed administration offices.
(4) A failure of the EU ETS would distort the internal market with the emergence of a patchwork of 27 different energy and climate measures ranging from regulations to taxation."
(5) It was found that the sequence variants within the locus are in a "patchwork" arrangement.
(6) Horizontal and vertical stripes were combined in the test pattern in three different ways: (1) overlapping with a luminance combination that gave rise to a perception of transparent overlays of horizontal and vertical stripes (valid transparency condition), (2) overlapping with luminance combinations that did not induce a perception of transparency (invalid transparency condition) and that appeared more as a patchwork of checks, and (3) presented in adjacent, nonoverlapping areas.
(7) Analysts say the continent must consolidate its patchwork of small countries and 30 overlapping trade blocs into a single huge market.
(8) So too the patchwork of traditional and sometimes dying rural practices he has long campaigned to highlight and save.
(9) The 1911 National Insurance Act embraced compulsory tripartite contributions from employee, employer and the state for the first time, but targeted the poorest for unemployment and (means-tested) pensions through a patchwork of voluntary and state agencies.
(10) The statutes are a confusing patchwork of conflicting and sexually biased laws.
(11) Only by developing a comprehensive stress-accident model will comprehensive and workable accident prevention programs be developed to replace the current patchwork of existing programs.
(12) The result was sharply tailored trousers and dresses created from blocks of colour with a patchwork of panels and chiffon butterfly prints.
(13) In September, Amnesty published an 82-page report – Northern Ireland: Time to deal with the past – claiming that the previous patchwork system of investigations into past Troubles crimes has proven inadequate for the task of establishing the full truth about human rights violations and abuses committed by all sides during the three decades of political violence.
(14) The map reveals that Y-chromosomal genes are scattered among a patchwork of X-homologous, Y-specific repetitive, and single-copy DNA sequences.
(15) As an alternative to the confusing patchwork that often characterizes child and adolescent mental health care, the mental health program of a children's social welfare agency offers a continuum of inpatient and outpatient services on one campus.
(16) Now these familiarly distinctive political regions will be joined by the battle in the east between the Tories and Ukip, and in Scotland between Labour and the Scottish National party, as well as a patchwork of others.
(17) While the south and west sides of the city contain some of the neighborhoods most starved for healthy foods, they also are home to at least a dozen urban agricultural businesses – Patchwork City Farms and Atwood Community Gardens, for instance.
(18) No genuinely all-Scotland quality paper ever emerged from this patchwork, but the Herald out of Glasgow and the Scotsman from Edinburgh became, together with the Irish Times and for a while the Yorkshire Post , the finest newspapers published in these islands outside London.
(19) One can see why Farrell objects to the term, although upon investigation I discover that the offender was German, and that the phrase "patchwork family" carries no negative connotations in his native tongue.
(20) As you enter through the heavy cast iron doors, turn left and you'll find a small museum area – where you can consume the Pierhead's patchwork history in a video.
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!)