What's the difference between ranter and ratter?

Ranter


Definition:

  • (n.) A noisy talker; a raving declaimer.
  • (n.) One of a religious sect which sprung up in 1645; -- called also Seekers. See Seeker.
  • (n.) One of the Primitive Methodists, who seceded from the Wesleyan Methodists on the ground of their deficiency in fervor and zeal; -- so called in contempt.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) They seem to think in a toxic media market, dominated by professional ranters and by one player, News Corp, intent on using its market dominance to pursue bleedingly obvious political and commercial agendas – that the ABC is not only comprehensive and reliable, but essential.
  • (2) Within this apocalyptic tradition, Cohn identified the Flagellants who massacred the Jews of Frankfurt in 1349; the widespread heresy of the Free Spirit; the 16th-century Anabaptist theocracy of Münster (though some have criticised Cohn's account of this extraordinary event as lurid); the Bohemian Hussites; the instigators of the German peasants' war; and the Ranters of the English civil war.
  • (3) For Abbott, on the precipice of fulfilling his destiny in politics, it would have seemed like collegiality, not outright soul-selling, to become a man for Peta and for Brian down in party headquarters, a man for the colleagues, a man for the Liberal party base, a man for Rupert and for Alan Jones and for Ray Hadley (when Scott Morrison wasn’t available) – a man who would validate the various irrationalisms of the wireless ranters and the white male columnists in Rupert’s employ – young and older fogeys who cherish past certainties, and who feel just as ambivalent about the future as Abbott himself feels.
  • (4) It is a book fair in October with "all-day cabaret starring assorted ranters, poets, singers and comics; all-day film showings and two kids' spaces".
  • (5) MSNBC's resident ranter and news commentator Keith Olbermann – who once described a Republican senator as "an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model" – tweeted his umbrage at Stewart's intimation that he is unhelpfully hyperbolic, possibly before smashing his Blackberry underfoot.
  • (6) The derogatory comedy of Bernard Manning and Benny Hill was elbowed off the airwaves by proudly anti-racist, anti-sexist comics of the younger generation: anti-Thatcher ranter Ben Elton; Alexei Sayle, who describes his younger self as "a fat man in a suit, shouting at people for not being political enough"; feminist comics French and Saunders, Emma Thompson and Jo Brand.
  • (7) This week he will be interviewed by the rightwing ranter, radio host Rush Limbaugh, Limbaugh's TV equivalents, all three prime time hosts on Fox News, and play verbal softball with Oprah Winfrey.
  • (8) We were correct not to engage with the ranters on the right.
  • (9) More pub ranter than soundbite-spewing talking head.
  • (10) This has not been not a harmonious year, and male rage is definitely part of the landscape – the trolls, men’s rights movement misogynists, Gamergate ranters, and the perpetrators of the actual violence, which has not stopped.
  • (11) An intriguing snapshot of a hack's navel, it at least earned me the grand sobriquet "Ranter of the Guardian" in the Daily Mail (who know a thing or two about publishing ill-thought-through opinions themselves, after all), though the affair needn't be examined in any further detail here.
  • (12) This week’s cause for irritability is the stupidity of both the pro-privatisation lobby (the government and red-necked Conservatives, who want to privatise everything that moves) and the anti-privatisationists (the “keep your mucky capitalist hands off our perfect NHS” ranters).
  • (13) More than any other modern novelist, he has used fiction as confession and the displacement of confession: his ranters, complainers and alter egos, from Portnoy to Zuckerman to Mickey Sabbath all seem Rothian, even when they are only standing in for Roth.

Ratter


Definition:

  • (n.) One who, or that which, rats, as one who deserts his party.
  • (n.) Anything which catches rats; esp., a dog trained to catch rats; a rat terrier. See Terrier.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) I rather like Bryant – a "little wire-haired ratter", according to Daphne – who becomes increasingly bombastic as the book proceeds.