(n.) A rag, or a part torn and hanging; -- chiefly used in the plural.
(v. t.) To rend or tear into rags; -- used chiefly in the past participle as an adjective.
Example Sentences:
(1) But over-promising has left him in a worse position with all three than he was in before, and with his credibility in tatters.
(2) The Guardian witnessed one desperate vignette in Gevgeliya on Saturday: a Syrian woman in her 40s asking a fellow traveller for money to buy shoes as hers were in tatters.
(3) Barack Obama's policy of engagement with North Korea lies "in tatters" after it was effectively shot down by Pynongyang's defiant but failed attempt to launch a long-range rocket.
(4) George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, said: "This is hugely significant, as it completely vindicates the big decision taken by David Cameron and myself on the economy, and it leaves Gordon Brown's political plans for the G20 and the budget in tatters."
(5) An attempt by George Osborne to besmirch the reputation of Ed Balls by linking him directly to the Libor-fixing scandal lay in tatters on Monday night after the Bank of England cleared the shadow chancellor .
(6) The violence has left in tatters a 2013 ceasefire aimed at allowing a final peace deal to end the PKK’s three-decade insurgency, which has claimed tens of thousands of lives.
(7) Matthew Pennycook is MP for Greenwich and Woolwich Louise Haigh: ‘Bringing down Corbyn would be an act of betrayal’ Facebook Twitter Pinterest Louise Haigh New Labour was a response to a Tory party in tatters, besieged by scandal, its fiscal credibility in ruins, tired and out of ideas.
(8) Sunderland’s right-back, Santiago Vergini, inadvertently gave Southampton the lead by lashing the ball into his own net in the 12th minute, and that signalled the start of a barmy encounter that had home fans in raptures and Sunderland in tatters.
(9) The US has warned it could level “serious sanctions” on Russia within days over breaches of Ukraine’s truce, which is in tatters despite pro-Moscow rebels and government forces exchanging scores of prisoners.
(10) Even if you don't get the gag on the way in – the doormen wear tattered clothes – then the penny drops when you enter the L-shaped, 200-capacity basement and see the satirical murals spoofing Manhattan's high-society swells.
(11) Even her own colleagues are saying her net migration target is in tatters.
(12) He had taken from YuzuÞ the tattered evidence of my walk across South Asia and was examining it: the clipping from the newspaper in western Nepal, 'Mr Stewart is a pilgrim for peace'; the letter from the Conservator, Second Circle, Forestry Department, Himachal Pradesh, India: 'Mr Stewart, a Scot, is interested in the environment'; from a District OfÞcer in the Punjab and a Secretary of the Interior in a Himalayan state and a Chief Engineer of the Pakistan Department of Irrigation requesting 'All Executive Engineers (XENs) on the Lower Bari Doab to assist Mr Stewart, who will be undertaking a journey on foot to research the history of the canal system'.
(13) He accomplished a few, mainly social reforms – but he leaves a country on edge, and a left in tatters.
(14) He’s also received a legal notice telling him a court judgment had been entered against him, and his credit file was left in tatters, leaving his plans to build an extension hanging in the balance.
(15) As Scotland Yard surveys the tatters of the Morgan case the picture has become not clearer but more opaque.
(16) The sudden switch by Yanukovych following weeks of brinkmanship left European policy towards the post-Soviet states to its east in tatters.
(17) The opposition is in tatters and divided on how to confront this implacable force.
(18) Awet clutches a tattered Norwegian identity card as he talks.
(19) She arrived, shoved her pager at me and a tattered piece of paper with about 12 names on it.
(20) The chancellor's forecasts of £43bn of borrowing this year are in tatters and some experts have warned that debt could balloon to £120bn in three years.
Totter
Definition:
(v. i.) To shake so as to threaten a fall; to vacillate; to be unsteady; to stagger; as,an old man totters with age.
(v. i.) To shake; to reel; to lean; to waver.
Example Sentences:
(1) Most ship-breaking workers are migrants from the north who rent rooms in the warren of makeshift shanties that totter over the water’s edge.
(2) The European Union (EU), one of the more promising developments of the post-world war II period, has been tottering because of the harsh effect of the policies of austerity during recession, condemned even by the economists of the International Monetary Fund (if not the IMF’s political actors).
(3) In one allele of the tottering locus, a pathogenetic lesion linking noradrenergic hyperinnervation with cortical spike-wave discharges has been identified.
(4) The most significant difference from last year's London event is that instead of a tottering and discredited transitional regime, Somalia now has a fully fledged government, led by Hassan Sheikh Mohamud.
(5) But the damage of a Greek exit will be out of all proportion to its size, as other dominoes totter, damaging confidence and trade even if they don't fall.
(6) As she tottered around a crime scene in high heels, I had the strong feeling that Cubitt, now directing the series as well as writing it, had put out of his mind altogether the cries of misogyny that trailed the first series.
(7) It means you can totter into the kitchen to put the kettle on 10 times a day.
(8) There are few precedents for such an explosive political ascent in modern western Europe; in Spain, a discredited political elite appears to be tottering.
(9) Hippocampal CA3 pyramidal neurons in the adult epileptic mutant mouse tottering (tg) show normal intrinsic membrane properties, yet fire abnormally prolonged paroxysmal depolarizing shifts (PDS) during in vitro exposure to elevated extracellular potassium solutions.
(10) Immunocytochemical staining for tyrosine hydroxylase demonstrated the pronounced hyperinnervation in the "tottering" brain, whereas both serotonin and choline acetyltransferase immunostaining were similar between "tottering" and wild type.
(11) Leading care and health bodies are demanding crisis talks with ministers over the unravelling of measures in George Osborne ’s spending review that were supposed to prop up the tottering social care system.
(12) Older versions of 1980s and 1990s politicians – Lord Carrington, John Prescott – tottered in and out of the chamber.
(13) It's not easy and, with Tom and I hoisting him up, we worry that he might totter and fall.
(14) But in El Salvador the challenge is exacerbated by tottering public institutions, high rates of sexual violence, inadequate sex education and a backdrop of violence and gang warfare which are undermining efforts to control the outbreak.
(15) The two bankers are also heard laughing and joking at a time when the bank was tottering on the brink of destruction.
(16) No significant difference in Bmax or Kd values was identified between adult tottering and control mice in any of the tissue preparations.
(17) The petit-mal seizures of the "tottering" mutant mouse (tg) have been attributed to an exaggerated noradrenergic projection from locus coeruleus to the telencephalon (Noebels 1984).
(18) The tottering mouse resulted from a recessively inherited, autosomal, single-locus mutation which produces a very characteristic neurological and cellular phenotype.
(19) Occasionally it is alleged that the billet began to totter during the stroke and that the left hand responded to this stimulus by an unwilled movement to the billet.
(20) I see an extremely united front.” Unity is all the more necessary ahead of the Dutch elections in March and the French presidential elections , in the spring in which the anti-EU populists Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen threaten upsets that would, together or separately, represent existential threats to the tottering European project.