What is "riffraff"

Usage examples of "riffraff".

When she was on the verge of slipping to the floor she was administered ever-increasing doses of heroin over a period of two weeks, then prettified by a hairdresser and taken to the crudest of whorehouses in Durango, patronized by the poorest cowboys and miners and riffraff.

I was at the point where I could almost tolerate Mafia dons and their peers in black limousines, but hit men, gun molls, and other riffraff were another matter.

The demeaning task of working the land with slaves and riffraff who barely spoke any Istrian but grunted away in their own incomprehensible languages had further engendered in him a complete disregard for the sensibility of others, except when they were clearly in pain.

You evict the riffraff, they come here, and you rerent your property for three times what you were getting.

But all the same, never within the memory of man have the riffraff, bandits and skulkers combined into a force of such numbers.

Hiraga hunched down as he went back to the comparative safety of the Japanese village-- safe only so long as the riffraff and drunks did not decide to rampage.

Material relating to them has, on the whole, been scanted by annalists, since they were heroes too disreputable for classic myth, too cryptically independent ever to let themselves be tied to a folk, too shifty and improbable in their adventurings to please the historian, too often involved with a riffraff of dubious demons, unfrocked sorcerers, and discredited deities—a veritable underworld of the supernatural.

Material relating to them has, on the whole, been scanted by annalists, since they were heroes too disreputable for classic myth, too cryptically independent ever to let themselves be tied to a folk, too shifty and improbable in their adventurings to please the historian, too often involved with a riffraff of dubious demons, unfrocked sorcerers, and discredited deities -- a veritable underworld of the supernatural.

I reminded myself that Billy and the Alphas had already had their baptism by fire, and they'd had almost two years to hone their skills against some of the low-intensity riffraff of the Chicago underground scene.

But I'd forgotten that, just like the aristocratic blue bloods of America have forgotten what they learned in history--that most of their ancestors were the riffraff of Europe--thieves, jailbirds, beggars, and outcasts.

The pirates, a motley coalition of outlaws, career criminals, and assorted riffraff from the three city-states had united under a leader to try to take control of the rich resources of the Western Islands.

To take her mind off the riffraff, JoLayne recited for Tom Krome a roster of local birds, resident and migratory: ospreys, snowy egrets, white herons, blue herons, kingfishers, flycatchers, cardinals, grackles, robins, red-tailed hawks, white-crowned pigeons, flickers, roseate spoonbills .

To take her mind off the riffraff, JoLayne recited for Tom Krome a roster of local birds, resident and migratory: ospreys, snowy egrets, white herons, blue herons, kingfishers, flycatchers, cardinals, grackles, robins, red-tailed hawks, white-crowned pigeons, flickers, roseate spoonbills.

Unless one wipes out the riffraff and excess baggage, one gets an awful lot of problems—.

Unless one wipes out the riffraff and excess baggage, one gets an awful lot of problems-problems like we have now.