(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.
Vassal
Definition:
(n.) The grantee of a fief, feud, or fee; one who holds land of superior, and who vows fidelity and homage to him; a feudatory; a feudal tenant.
(n.) A subject; a dependent; a servant; a slave.
(a.) Resembling a vassal; slavish; servile.
(v. t.) To treat as a vassal; to subject to control; to enslave.
Example Sentences:
(1) A eurozone nakedly dominated by one state, Germany, enforcing destructive austerity on its vassals with such brutality, can have no enduring legitimacy.
(2) Data previously obtained (Tartakoff, A.M., and P. Vassalli.
(3) Does it occur to you that this process is totalitarian and that you behave as if the hundreds of thousands of teachers, parents, students and academics involved in education are your vassals?
(4) Another significant reason that Kenyan forces may be trying to create in Somalia a vassal state – or "buffer zone", as the Kenyan government prefers to call it – is to protect its own projects.
(5) The disputed subtropical archipelago lies between Japan and Taiwan, and in the course of its history was a vassal state of China , paying tribute for years before coming under Japanese sovereignty.
(6) They pointed out that the kingdom had previously been a Chinese vassal state, adding that the ruling Qing dynasty had been too weak to resist Japan's advance.
(7) He said such a situation would fail to give the sovereignty over laws and borders that people wanted through the leave vote, he said, adding: “To adopt the Norwegian situation would be to become a vassal state, because you actually end up paying money into the EU budget but you have less control over the regulations than you do now with a seat round the table.” The question of the single market is opening up another potential divide for Labour after Corbyn also insisted the UK would have to leave the grouping when Brexit takes place.
(8) Farm subsidies are the 21st century equivalent of feudal aid: the taxes medieval vassals were forced to pay their lords for the privilege of being sat upon.
(9) Gardiner also used the interview to claim that the UK would become a “vassal state” if it tried to replicate Norway, which has unfettered access to single market through its membership of the European Economic Area.
(10) The party believed Scotland was theirs for keeps, that voters could go nowhere else (whoops); and, in turn, Westminster Labour saw Scottish Labour as its vassal, too.
(11) We now want to focus also on cultural tourism, valorising our archaeological sites like Carthage, El Jam and the Bardo National Museum, where the richest collection of Roman mosaics in the world is kept.” Much of the compound was designed by and for the Beys, vassal-kings who ruled the area on behalf of the Ottoman empire from the early 18th century.
(12) Measurements of leukocyte enzymes confirm the findings of Vassalli et al.
(13) It wasn't all wrath and fury – although Putin made sure to point out that the US feared Russia's geographical size and its nuclear arsenal and "didn't want allies, but vassals".
(14) Here, Benedita Rocha, Pierre Vassalli and Delphine Guy-Grand discuss the rules of selection of extrathymic T cells, assess the possible role of these cells in the defence of epithelial integrity and their potential role in autoimmune disease.
(15) Editors, two of whose journalists had been jailed at the time of the scandal concerning the Soviet spy John Vassall, were reluctant to cross the Macmillan government again.
(16) The participants include not just practicing architects – such as the French duo Lacaton & Vassal, masterminds of the barely-there Palais de Tokyo in Paris – but also artists (like Pedro Reyes) and hybrid outfits such as the Turner Prize-nominated collective Assemble.
(17) Several cell types display binding sites for [125I]urokinase (Vassalli, J.-D., D. Baccino, D. Belin.