What's the difference between precarious and tottering?

Precarious


Definition:

  • (a.) Depending on the will or pleasure of another; held by courtesy; liable to be changed or lost at the pleasure of another; as, precarious privileges.
  • (a.) Held by a doubtful tenure; depending on unknown causes or events; exposed to constant risk; not to be depended on for certainty or stability; uncertain; as, a precarious state of health; precarious fortunes.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) This case demonstrates that the manifestations may be delayed and that urgent surgical intervention may be lifesaving despite the precarious status of these patients.
  • (2) Enlargement to include poorer states such as Armenia, Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan would make the balance of the EEU even more precarious.
  • (3) Matthew Taylor was appointed by Theresa May last October to review employment practices in the light of concerns about the precarious nature of work, particularly in the gig economy.
  • (4) The diagnosis has usually been made only at autopsy, and early surgical intervention has often been withheld because of the patient's precarious hematological status.
  • (5) Rather than experiencing a slowdown in its frenetic building sector, however, Kabul is increasingly overrun with precarious apartment blocks.
  • (6) One suggestion is to abandon the scheme in London and south-east England but continue it in the north and Midlands, where market conditions are less precarious.
  • (7) What’s left for such workers is the same as their blue-collar counterparts: lower wages, precarious work and a lot of borrowing.
  • (8) After more than a quarter of a century of camping out, the house, with its seven flights of stairs (a trial to Lessing in her final years), seemed almost to be supported by a precarious interior scaffolding of piles of books and shelves.
  • (9) Some of these are functions that would once have been taken on through squatting – and sometimes still are, as at Open House , a social centre recently and precariously opened in London's Elephant & Castle, an area torn apart by rampant gentrification, where estates are flogged off to developers with zero commitment to public housing and the aforementioned "shopping village" is located in a derelict estate.
  • (10) But I think that can be repaired.” Although Senate Republican leaders have been more willing to rally behind Trump, their members find themselves in a decidedly precarious position.
  • (11) The financial markets are keenly aware of Britain's precarious position.
  • (12) Not infrequently the only unilateral care overlooks important aspects, which are precarious for the course of the disease.
  • (13) The predilection of rectal stricture and its proposed precursor, salmonella ulcerative proctitis, for the middle third of the rectum was attributed to a normally precarious arterial supply which renders the rectum unusually susceptible to ischemic injury and decreases its reparative capacity.
  • (14) Despite public homage to the knowledge economy, this new regime seems designed to make the careers of the next generation of academics as precarious and unrewarding as possible.
  • (15) The precarious position of small schools is due to the loss of the local funding formula, and with it local democratic control.
  • (16) Buses drop workers on the roads and they make the precarious walk through the dark to their homes.
  • (17) When compared with classification by number of diseased vessels and by arteriographic score of Friesinger, the nonprecarious cases had better prognoses than the precarious.
  • (18) When people say it doesn’t matter who you vote for, in this election, in this seat, in this city, it really will.” Becca, who has spent the past two years in poorly paid and precarious part-time jobs, is one of 12 people recruited for the last of five focus groups organised by qualitative polling firm BritainThinks, working in partnership with the Guardian, to examine five key battleground seats and the larger political themes that will help decide the election.
  • (19) The AIDS situation highlights the precarious balance between individual rights and the public welfare, patients' rights, and the rights of nurses and their professional obligations.
  • (20) According to new research from the University of Exeter, women at the top of the ladder are being promoted into risky and precarious leadership positions where the chance of failure is high.

Tottering


Definition:

  • (p. pr. & vb. n.) of Totter

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Most ship-breaking workers are migrants from the north who rent rooms in the warren of makeshift shanties that totter over the water’s edge.
  • (2) The European Union (EU), one of the more promising developments of the post-world war II period, has been tottering because of the harsh effect of the policies of austerity during recession, condemned even by the economists of the International Monetary Fund (if not the IMF’s political actors).
  • (3) In one allele of the tottering locus, a pathogenetic lesion linking noradrenergic hyperinnervation with cortical spike-wave discharges has been identified.
  • (4) The most significant difference from last year's London event is that instead of a tottering and discredited transitional regime, Somalia now has a fully fledged government, led by Hassan Sheikh Mohamud.
  • (5) But the damage of a Greek exit will be out of all proportion to its size, as other dominoes totter, damaging confidence and trade even if they don't fall.
  • (6) As she tottered around a crime scene in high heels, I had the strong feeling that Cubitt, now directing the series as well as writing it, had put out of his mind altogether the cries of misogyny that trailed the first series.
  • (7) It means you can totter into the kitchen to put the kettle on 10 times a day.
  • (8) There are few precedents for such an explosive political ascent in modern western Europe; in Spain, a discredited political elite appears to be tottering.
  • (9) Hippocampal CA3 pyramidal neurons in the adult epileptic mutant mouse tottering (tg) show normal intrinsic membrane properties, yet fire abnormally prolonged paroxysmal depolarizing shifts (PDS) during in vitro exposure to elevated extracellular potassium solutions.
  • (10) Immunocytochemical staining for tyrosine hydroxylase demonstrated the pronounced hyperinnervation in the "tottering" brain, whereas both serotonin and choline acetyltransferase immunostaining were similar between "tottering" and wild type.
  • (11) Leading care and health bodies are demanding crisis talks with ministers over the unravelling of measures in George Osborne ’s spending review that were supposed to prop up the tottering social care system.
  • (12) Older versions of 1980s and 1990s politicians – Lord Carrington, John Prescott – tottered in and out of the chamber.
  • (13) It's not easy and, with Tom and I hoisting him up, we worry that he might totter and fall.
  • (14) But in El Salvador the challenge is exacerbated by tottering public institutions, high rates of sexual violence, inadequate sex education and a backdrop of violence and gang warfare which are undermining efforts to control the outbreak.
  • (15) The two bankers are also heard laughing and joking at a time when the bank was tottering on the brink of destruction.
  • (16) No significant difference in Bmax or Kd values was identified between adult tottering and control mice in any of the tissue preparations.
  • (17) The petit-mal seizures of the "tottering" mutant mouse (tg) have been attributed to an exaggerated noradrenergic projection from locus coeruleus to the telencephalon (Noebels 1984).
  • (18) The tottering mouse resulted from a recessively inherited, autosomal, single-locus mutation which produces a very characteristic neurological and cellular phenotype.
  • (19) Occasionally it is alleged that the billet began to totter during the stroke and that the left hand responded to this stimulus by an unwilled movement to the billet.
  • (20) I see an extremely united front.” Unity is all the more necessary ahead of the Dutch elections in March and the French presidential elections , in the spring in which the anti-EU populists Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen threaten upsets that would, together or separately, represent existential threats to the tottering European project.

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