(v. t.) A servant or slave employed in husbandry, and in some countries attached to the soil and transferred with it, as formerly in Russia.
Example Sentences:
(1) This is bad news for aggregators whose digital serfs cut, paste, compile and mangle abstracts of news stories that real media outlets produce at great expense.
(2) His moment of fame is over and he vanishes into the shadowlands of Britain's serf-labour force.
(3) The Pavlovs, a highly achievement-oriented family descending from a lowly serf, improved their social status by serving the Russian Orthodox Church.
(4) They desired, rather, that it be lived on a higher level than that of a serf, treated as an inconvenience by a moribund oligarchy.
(5) It is the centenary of President Lincoln's inauguration, and of the beginning of the Civil War which ended with the liberation of the American slaves; it is also the centenary of the decree that emancipated the Russian serfs.
(6) At their best, blogs such as Nightjack, or the Civil Serf who revealed life in a Whitehall office before also being exposed, made the public services more open, and improved debate about how they should run.
(7) It is "simply disgusting at a time when people are struggling to heat their homes, these energy barons are treating them like serfs, and the government and the regulator are letting them get away with it," he said.
(8) So, he put his best serfs on it and came up with a birth certificate naming his father, Fred.
(9) The oldest is a 64-year-old who fled civil war only to find herself virtually imprisoned in the UK as an unpaid domestic serf.
(10) This threat is used to justify the absence of a constitution, the destruction of the judicial system, and the implementation of indefinite national service that allows the government to treat each civilian as a modern-day serf for their whole life.
(11) As always, the rich and powerful want to know all they can about us – "the serfs and slaves" as Assange called us – while letting us know as little as possible about them.
(12) The situation in the UK (as in Italy) continues to be insupportable, yet somewhat like "serfs", we've seemed resigned to suffering it, as if no serious alternative existed.
(13) In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill into law which introduced some protections for these imported serfs, under what has become known as the guest-worker program.
(14) Almost all low-paid work is essential: a living wage would stop cheapskate employers scrounging off tax credits and importing what too often looks like serf-labour.
(15) Thirty per cent are labourers, labour tenants, and squatters on white farms and work and live under conditions similar to those of the serfs of the middle ages.
(16) A case could be made that the unhappy family of the opening is the Russian aristocracy in the 1870s, trying to hold the line against excessive change after the grant of freedom to millions of human beings it had owned as slaves, the peasant serfs, in 1861.
(17) But all the baggage of that word (unelected, concentrated power keeping serfs in chains) has no meaning at all applied to Christine Blower, the elected representative of working people whose decisions she can argue for or against but must always reflect.
(18) "Knowledge has always flowed upwards, to bishops and kings not down to serfs and slaves.
(19) That was Charles – impatient, controlling but also thoughtful towards his serfs.
(20) Back then Wimbledon felt like – in fact prided itself on being – a leftover from some ancien regime, with the players toiling and serfing on the lawns of a feudal estate.
Serfdom
Definition:
(n.) The state or condition of a serf.
Example Sentences:
(1) But Norwegians prefer serfdom to political influence.
(2) Romney has been looking and sounding like Vlad the Impaler for so long that all he had to do to exceed expectations was show up acting like someone who doesn't sleep in a crypt; strike a pose from the Ronald Reagan Compassionate Conservative playbook; spit out a few numbers; and seem puzzled by all of those, er, rumors about his plans to cut taxes for the rich and roll the rest of us back to serfdom.
(3) Last month, Lukashenko announced he intended to bring back “serfdom” to “teach the peasants to work more efficiently”.
(4) But here, for a moment, let's go back to the primary text, open our University of Chicago Press definitive edition of The Road to Serfdom and honestly read it in relation to the American healthcare debate.
(5) This is the true road to serfdom: disinventing democracy on behalf of the elite.
(6) Today Germany's political establishment seems committed to consigning German taxpayers to economic serfdom and stagflation for at least a generation – not for gold, to be fair, but for the euro, to assuage the markets and to appease international opinion.
(7) With vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan claiming that his ideas are inspired by Hayek and even handing out copies of The Road to Serfdom " to bring new staffers up to speed " – following the earlier highjacking of Hayek by Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh – it's time for some intellectual honesty.
(8) "In no system that could be rationally defended would the state just do nothing", he stressed in The Road to Serfdom (p88).
(9) Pushkin supported the 1825 Decembrist uprising that challenged the succession of Nicholas I. Gogol satirised the oppressions of serfdom before rapidly retreating.
(10) Few contemporary appraisals of seminal works manage to stay the distance, but, 50 years on, his reviews, for instance, of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and Eliot's Notes towards the Definition of Culture stand up as well, if not better, than the books themselves.
(11) Tea without good governance is serfdom and only leads to environmental and social problems."
(12) On the diplomacy, the idea that other European countries would be ready to start a second negotiation is for the birds.” Wave goodbye to the EU and say hello to serfdom | Letters Read more Downing Street said that the white paper, titled The Best of Both Worlds – Our Special Status in a Reformed EU , illustrated the impact of the welfare reforms that will curb access to in-work benefits for EU migrants.
(13) Surprisingly, those are the words of Friedrich Hayek, straight out of The Road to Serfdom.
(14) In 1944, towards the end of a war against a dictatorship, in The Road to Serfdom, Hayek wrote: “Nowhere has democracy ever worked well without a great measure of local self government.” That remains true.
(15) China rejects the criticism, saying its rule has ended serfdom and brought development to a backward region.
(16) To quote Dunlop again, “the idea that collective human action and decision making could work for the common good [is] not only discredited, [it] is recast as evil, a slippery slope to totalitarianism, the road to serfdom.” On the other hand, the organisations that, throughout the 20th century, enabled some form of participatory democracy have been increasingly marginalised, if not totally destroyed.
(17) Is spending more than 40 per cent of GDP on government - a level identified as the portals of serfdom by the new right - to fall into old socialist habits?