Ratten vs Batten - What's the difference?
ratten | batten |
(obsolete, Northern England) To sabotage machinery or tools as part of an industrial dispute, particularly the tools of a workman who went against the union.
* 1947 , Ivor John Carnegie Brown,
* 1867 , Report Presented to the Trades Unions Commissioners by the Examiners Appointed to Inquire Into Acts of Intimidation, Outrage, Or Wrong Alleged to Have Been Promoted, Encouraged, Or Connived at by Trades Unions in the Town of Sheffield, Great Britain. . G.E. Eyre and W. Spottiswoode, 1867.
To become better; improve in condition, especially by feeding.
To feed (on); to revel (in).
* 1890 , (Oscar Wilde), The Picture of Dorian Gray , ch. XIV:
To thrive by feeding; grow fat; feed oneself gluttonously.
* Garth
* Emerson
To thrive, prosper, or live in luxury, especially at the expense of others; fare sumptuously.
To gratify a morbid appetite or craving; gloat.
To improve by feeding; fatten; make fat or cause to thrive due to plenteous feeding.
* Milton
To fertilize or enrich, as land.
A thin strip of wood used in construction to hold members of a structure together or to provide a fixing point.
(nautical) A long strip of wood, metal, fibreglass etc used for various purposes aboard ship, especially one inserted in a pocket sewn on the sail in order to keep the sail flat.
In stagecraft, a long pipe, usually metal, affixed to the ceiling or fly system in a theater.
The movable bar of a loom, which strikes home or closes the threads of a woof.
As an adjective ratten
is rotten.As a verb batten is
to become better; improve in condition, especially by feeding or batten can be to furnish with battens.As a noun batten is
a thin strip of wood used in construction to hold members of a structure together or to provide a fixing point.ratten
English
Verb
(en verb)Say The Word, p 100:
- ...derived from the sabot or shoe beneath railway lines. The saboteur was thus a remover of metal shoes, a train-wrecker. I must leave it at that. Meanwhile why not restore ratten to its old place in the Trade Union vocabulary, that is if, in these times of scant, we must endure any such wanton hindrance of the works?
p. 225:
- Did you also employ them to ratten people if they had broken any rules of your society, for instance, by having too many apprentices?
batten
English
Etymology 1
From (etyl) *.Verb
(en verb)- The brain had its own food on which it battened , and the imagination, made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain, danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks.
- The pampered monarch lay battening in ease.
- Skeptics, with a taste for carrion, who batten on the hideous facts in history
- ''Robber barons who battened on the poor
- battening our flocks