(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.
Servant
Definition:
(n.) One who serves, or does services, voluntarily or on compulsion; a person who is employed by another for menial offices, or for other labor, and is subject to his command; a person who labors or exerts himself for the benefit of another, his master or employer; a subordinate helper.
(n.) One in a state of subjection or bondage.
(n.) A professed lover or suitor; a gallant.
(v. t.) To subject.
Example Sentences:
(1) There was also acknowledgement for two long-term servants to the men’s game who will both leave the Premier League for Major League Soccer this summer.
(2) The Dacre review panel, which included Sir Joseph Pilling, a retired senior civil servant, and the historian Prof Sir David Cannadine, said Britain now had one of the "less liberal" regimes in Europe for access to confidential government papers and that reform was needed to restore some trust between politicians and people.
(3) I am one of those retired civil servants who has not received my pension.
(4) Senior civil servant Simon Case joined the UK’s EU embassy in March to lead work on the new partnership with the bloc, but EU diplomats are unsure how he fits into the picture.
(5) The report was addressed personally to Farr and says it is not to be seen by civil servants, only by him, ministers and their special advisers.
(6) "Public servants did nothing to cause the slump but are being asked to bear an unfair share of the burden.
(7) So sensitive is the case that Hunt, his civil servants and advisers are expected to rebuff any external lobbying – so they can base their judgement only on a analysis of the public interest issues raised by the proposed deal that was completed by media regulator Ofcom today.
(8) A series of reports, written by civil servants and approved by ministers, will be published from the spring of next year until 2014 to examine the impact of everything from directives to the European Court of Justice.
(9) Here, the balance of power is clear: the master is dominating the servant – and not the other way around, as is the case with Google Now and the poor.
(10) Unions warned it could lead to a system where civil servants were loyal to their political masters rather than the taxpayer.
(11) Similar measurements were made in subjects with essential hypertension (77 white and 23 black), and 48 healthy normotensive white civil servants.
(12) You've just joined Twitter – why would you recommend it to other civil servants?
(13) Public servants who loved their useful work find only a few hours waiting on tables.
(14) The package included pay rises for civil servants and security personnel.
(15) "There are idle MPs with no outside interests and there are fantastic public servants that do have them."
(16) Helena writes: Ilias Iliopoulos, a leading figure at ADEDY, Greece's union of civil servants, has just told me: “This is a warning to the government not to pass the measures.Today was a huge success as witnessed by all those in the armed forces and police who also participated because they, too, will be affected by these cuts.
(17) Because for more than a year, he had bent the rules, constantly and persistently, in the face of warnings from his most senior civil servants?
(18) The public servants’ ethos, their attachment to the civic realm, has been systematically trashed as mere unionised self-interest.
(19) It blamed "confrontation maniacs" for "[making their] servants of conservative media let loose a whole string of sophism intended to hatch all sorts of dastardly wicked plots and float misinformation".
(20) The current authors explored this issue in a cohort of 18,274 male civil servants, among whom there were 1,282 cancer deaths over 18-20 years of follow-up.