(v. i.) To play the ruffian; to rage; to raise tumult.
Example Sentences:
(1) Behind the Manchester ruffian image, they were conscientious people.
(2) These trousers, it later transpired, cost £995, and Nicky Morgan duly seized that predictable bait and snorted, “I don’t think I’ve ever spent that much on anything apart from my wedding dress.” After all, she added, while possibly patting a young local ruffian on the head, “My barometer is always, ‘How am I going to explain this in Loughborough market?” I think this was Morgan’s clueless way of saying she keeps it real, but it didn’t really work because those trousers looked exactly like the kind of thing sold in my local market, which, just this weekend, alongside the £1 Christmas crackers, was selling leather bustiers and disgusting, studded leather jackets.
(3) Two centuries later, Ruskin echoed these sentiments: Caravaggio, he claimed, painted “for the sake of the shadows”, and he was a “ruffian … distinguished only by his preference for candlelight and reinforcement of villainy”.
(4) Budget night at the opera: 28 March 1980 The souvenir programme (with it being a gala night, the programme cost more than a seat in some other theatres) promised "knights, esquires, ladies, ruffians, pages, maskers, soldiers, ushers, halberdiers, cupbearers and gondoliers."
(5) With their tight jeans and updated teddy-boy styles, the four gaff lads exude rough sex: they could have walked straight out of the Smiths's "Rusholme Ruffians" from the album Meat is Murder.
Unreliable
Definition:
(a.) Not reliable; untrustworthy. See Reliable.
Example Sentences:
(1) Pure bile gave 32 correct diagnoses (67%) and 14 diagnoses of inadequate material (29%), which contained few nondegenerated cells and made microscopic diagnosis unreliable.
(2) This measurement system, therefore, was found to be unreliable.
(3) My unreliable BlackBerry was hurting business," she said.
(4) It is well known that dopaminergic agents are stimulators of GH release in man, and although responses are sometimes unreliable, oral L-dopa and iv dopamine have frequently been employed in the evaluation of GH-deficient states.
(5) The existence of a latent viral infection state in these seronegative subjects indicates the unreliability of standard serological analysis in people who have been in regular contact with infected patients.
(6) The unreliable items were then deleted, and the revised scales were assessed in Study 2.
(7) Although electroencephalogram was set up to detect the sign of brain ischemia during surgery, it became unreliable because of electrical noise from the medical instruments.
(8) In high thoracic level lesion paraplegics monitoring heart rate was considered to be unreliable because of suspicion of injury to the sympathetic contribution to the cardiac plexus.
(9) The eversion technique was unreliable and probably injurious to endothelial cells.
(10) Our results implied that crepitation is a rather unreliable sign of arthrosis.
(11) In other words clinical and laboratory diagnosis of "cardiac liver" was found to be totally unreliable whereas, among instrumental examinations, liver echography proved to be a reasonably efficient alternative to laparoscopy.
(12) During automated perimetry with the Humphrey Visual Field Analyzer, field examinations are labeled unreliable whenever the reported rate of fixation loss is 20% or more.
(13) It is only useful when there is doubt and in this case both a lateral and an antero-posterior film are necessary as the obstetric conjugate alone was unreliable in predicting the transverse diameter of the inlet as well as the outcome.
(14) The size of the spleen was an unreliable diagnostic parameter as regards involvement with lymphogranulomatosis.
(15) Although exercise-induced ST segment depression is thought to be unreliable marker of myocardial ischemia in the presence of resting electrocardiographic changes, this conclusion is based on limited and disparate data from studies often lacking acceptable measures of ischemia.
(16) Preliminary evidence (n = 15) with semiquantitative (latex) determinations of C-reactive protein (CRP) suggested an unreliable CRP response in systemic Group B streptococcal infection.
(17) Solubility tests for sickling disorders (Itano) also proved unreliable.
(18) We emphasize that maternal serum AFP levels may be unreliable for prenatal screening for fetal neural tube defects in women taking valproate and recommend that amniocentesis and fetal ultrasound examination should be offered directly.
(19) Australia has chosen an unreliable security and surveillance partner.
(20) Whereas suboptimal sensitivity and sampling error may make a negative diagnosis unreliable, lymphoma marker studies (combined with morphology) allow for an accurate and confident diagnosis and subclassification of lymphoma in the majority of cases.