Crossword clues for riff-raff
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Wiktionary
n. (alternative spelling of riffraff English)
Wikipedia
Riff-Raff is a 1991 British film directed by Ken Loach, starring Robert Carlyle and Ricky Tomlinson (the latter plays, and was in real life, a builder). It won the 1991 European Film Award Best Picture award.
As with most Loach films, Riff-Raff is a naturalistic portrayal of modern Britain. It follows Stevie, played by Robert Carlyle, a Glaswegian recently released from prison who has moved to London and got a job on a building site turning a derelict hospital into luxury apartments.
Usage examples of "riff-raff".
A few officers, who had been dining with the various generals who had their headquarters there, or with friends on board ship, were the sole people in the streets, although from some of the closed windows of the drinking-shops in the Greek quarter came sounds of singing and noise, for every one was earning high wages, and the place was full of Maltese, Alexandrians, Smyrniotes, and, indeed, the riff-raff of all the Mediterranean cities, who had flocked to the scene of action to make money as petty traders, hucksters, camp-followers, mule-drivers, or commissariat-laborers.
They were forever playing to the prejudices of the vast, unintegrated, dissatisfied, general riff-raff.
It had a desperate reputation, morally, in the old keel-boating and early steamboating times--plenty of drinking, carousing, fisticuffing, and killing there, among the riff-raff of the river, in those days.
It was the chicest, most exclusive world in the planetary system, handy for commuting to other planets, yet far enough away from the riff-raff to be ideal for the mega-rich.
Immediately after the 14th of July," 1789, he organized in his quarter of the city[63] a small independent republic, aggressive and predominant, the center of the faction, a refuge for the riff-raff and a rendezvous for fanatics, a pandemonium composed of every available madcap, every rogue, visionary, shoulder-hitter, newspaper scribbler and stump-speaker, either a secret or avowed plotter of murder, Camille Desmoulins, Fréron, Hébert, Chaumette, Clootz, Théroigne, Marat, -- while, in this more than Jacobin State, the model in anticipation of that he is to establish later, he reigns, as he will afterwards reign, the permanent president of the district, commander of the battalion, orator of the club, and the concocter of bold undertakings.
Contrast with these the arbiters of their lives and deaths, the potentates of the same quarter who issue the warrants of arrest against them, who pen them in to speculate on them, and who revel at their expense and before their eyes: these consist of the members of the revolutionary committee of the Croix-Rouge, the eighteen convicted rogues and debauchees previously described,[152] ex-cab-drivers, porters, cobblers, street messengers, stevedores, bankrupts, counterfeiters, former or future jail-birds, all clients of the police or alms-house riff-raff.
It's a Calvinist principle that there is an entrance fee to heaven, to keep the riff-raff out.
Such degradations might be all very well for riff-raff from villages in Sylhet or the bicycle-repair shops of Gujranwala, but he was cut from different cloth!
Among the riff-raff rank and file of the shadow executives it's known as the clammy handshake and we call it that to make fun of it because it scares us to death.