How To Use Tenuous In A Sentence

In the days following the D-Day landings, Allied troops carved a tenuous foothold on the coast of Normandy.
The Bush stooges and their lackeys in the media know that they are hanging by a tenuous thread that is unraveling ever faster and faster.
These comments provide a glimpse into the thinking of a layer of extremely wealthy Hollywood liberals or erstwhile liberals, whose commitment to democratic rights is increasingly tenuous.
Women were banned from competing and spectating at the original Games, and shot put is barely 100 years old, so the direct linkage with the ancient past was tenuous.
With few marketable skills or capital upon their arrival, Irish men secured only a tenuous foothold in the province's secondary labour market, working as labourers, harvesters, ploughmen and general farm hands.

With few marketable skills or capital upon their arrival, Irish men secured only a tenuous foothold in the province's secondary labour market, working as labourers, harvesters, ploughmen and general farm hands.
It was a pragmatic alliance, but tenuous from the start. The Short, Violent Life of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
In the days following the D-Day landings, Allied troops carved a tenuous foothold on the coast of Normandy.
Now coming up with tenuous rationales for persuading unwitting students to choose your major is hardly unique to any field of study.
This is probably the most tenuous link yet to the 2012 Olympics. Times, Sunday Times
The United Peace Alliance had only a tenuous connection with the organized Labour movement.
If I can just figure out some tenuous contextual link…
Do you not see the tenuous link in all of this? Times, Sunday Times
Aircraft wheels could yet again be groping tenuously for the asphalt of Kai Tak, Hong Kong's unlamented previous airport, if private pilots and other aviation enthusiasts get their way.
A relationship between Francine and her sister Dawn is tenuous and unconvincing.
This painting has both a landscape and figural feel, as a faint green underpainting pokes tenuously (like grass) through a peach-colored second ground that has the tactility of flesh.
If his legacy remains, like that of the beggarwoman, tenuous, it is because he offers us a lesson about the inability of our allegories of intellectual history to account for the linguistic structure of the events they strive to depict. Reading, Begging, Paul de Man
It clings tenuously to the stony mountainside in a thin line of hairpins before dropping out of sight.
They do not have to be resident here and the publication or individual they are suing need have only tenuous connections with the UK. Times, Sunday Times
As the debate has gone on, the arguments have got thinner and thinner and more tenuous from the Opposition.
The open mutiny by the military and police highlights Mr Wahid's tenuous grip on the presidency.
The cultural and historical links between the many provinces were seen to be very tenuous.
Snootily leptorrhinian law, in phoenix real estate search to ravishment for overmuch intravasation oleaginousness vulva, a coolant tenuous villahermosa to the floored nyctanassa synchronoscope that he is effectively parrotlike to hardpan as a hypochoeris of his reproof. Rational Review
a tenuous fluid
Within these limits, however, empty spaces were not terra incognita, which is what some scholars have assumed the blanks on colonial maps represented; they were not perilous "margins and thresholds," "reminders of the failure of knowledge and hence the tenuousness of possession. Where Women Make History: Gendered Tellings of Community and Change in Magude, Mozambique
Of course, the ascription is tenuous, and wars are fought over the erasure of place, as though to suggest it was malleable.
On the other hand, even tenuous cirrus clouds absorb significant amounts of thermal infrared radiation emitted by the ground and the lower atmosphere.
We were only able to make a tenuous connection between the two robberies.
But the central idea - that of the unexciting English town staking its tenuous claim to historical distinction - is an intriguing one.
But most people understood her grasp on the position was tenuous at best.
The final assumption, which is actually a subcategory of the second assumption, may be a bit more tenuous.
The United Peace Alliance had only a tenuous connection with the organized Labour movement.
Even the most tenuous thread of story is infinitely better than none at all.
The tenuous nature of the rebels' grip on the capital was clear at the makeshift headquarters of the so-called Tripoli Brigade, described as a hand-picked team assigned the job of securing the city. Boston.com Top Stories
This tenuous link does not help me to be entirely clear as to the riddle's solution. Times, Sunday Times
The company's management has long argued that the relationship between ASP and gross margin is tenuous at best and we were cautioned a half dozen times not to "misconstrue" last week's results and declining ASPs. Minyanville
But these cancers are only tenuously linked to sunburn - many are found on areas of the body not commonly exposed to the sun, such as the soles of the feet and the buttocks.
Nirvana was able to seek refuge in two camps, with one foot tenuously dipped in the waters of grunge, and one grimy boot firmly set in the world of punk rock.
Recently published documentary evidence enables one to support these possibly tenuous impressions with fact, however.
Christianity's anyway tenuous situation in the holy land eroded.
Consider the view that the link between aggregate consumption and current measured income is a tenuous one. 4.
Only the ceaseless exercise of power, especially by the weighty “great powers,” might hold contentious states in tenuous equilibrium. What Would Wilson Do?
Some of her brief message-poems for friends can seem tenuous and transitory.
Such thefts were too danger-ous now and, in fact, had been forbidden by the tenuous treaty that the Elvenlords had agreed to with them-but the Wizards were not craftsfolk or terribly successful farmers. Elvenborn
An environmentally ill person is already in tenuous health. An Alternative Approach to Allergies
The free-association part of my brain works overtime and I can base a wisecrack on the most tenuous of links between this and that.
The tenuous suggestion that Stonehenge may thus be a sepulchral monument, is perhaps strengthened by the large number of burial mounds in the surrounding landscape.
Here, we present 16 luscious females, each of whom has a tenuous link to football and ask: just who has the hottest totty?
Yes I know the links to Enron are tenuous at best, but since when has that stopped various newspapers.
He is also linked, though tenuously, to the men who attacked the World Trade Centre in 1993.
‘But there is a link - however tenuous - between the clubs and the hooligans, whether the clubs like it or not,’ he said.
She gave a long exhalation of breath, it sounded tenuous and concerned.
In soaring above the region of phenomena and entering the tenuous aether of noumena, her present wings, which we call her methods, would in such an atmosphere be no longer of any service for movement. Thoughts on Religion
When the dead body of a Ukrainian porter is discovered in the restaurant cellar, the tenuous balance in Gabe's life begins to slip. In the Kitchen by Monica Ali: Questions
The head stock was badly worn, which meant the forks carrying the front wheel were tenuously attached to the bikes frame.
This ingenuousness is doubtless dependent upon several factors, such as the primitiveness of the world, the isolation and uniqueness of the cities, the disparateness of cultures and the tenuousness of communication. Magicians of Gor
The biological realism of this restricted model is tenuous.
Nell's work demonstrates that a few families of Khoisan or slave origin managed to keep a tenuous hold on land through the first half of the nineteenth century, but for most Khoisan in the region, it is safe to assume that, as Giliomee wrote about the eastern frontier, "Such was the structure of colonial society that even Ordinance 50 of 1828 failed materially to change the position of the Khoikhoi. Belongings: Property, Family, and Identity in Colonial South Africa
And now the flame was as tenuous and dim as that of a dying oilstone; now he must make it burn more brightly. THE BROKEN GOD
Some with more tenuous links will miss out on the right officially to call themselves Scots. Times, Sunday Times
Problem is, this pushes Mandell's vaguely tenuous, aloof vocals up front, affected twangs, warbles and all.
Again, this is an ideological construct with tenuous roots in reality.
The tenuous society of Sitka is well depicted at all its levels. Torchwood finale and season
Troops readily change their allegiances, while the dividing line between non-belligerents and those in active service is tenuous and easily shifted.
Two recently brokered peace agreements in Africa, in Sudan and the Congo, are extremely tenuous.
One surprise is that in the initial data, sodium was seen in the spectroscopic data, and Colaprete said sodium exists in the Moon's tenuous atmosphere called the exosphere, and perhaps something got thermalized during the impact excite the sodium atoms to where strong visible emission lines showed up in the data. Moon Impact Data and Images from LCROSS: First Glance | Universe Today
We rush down the glacier solving its intricacies by interminable weaving, creeping over tenuous bridges, snowplowing desperately below the shrouded rock.
Leftwich's prospects for a long-term grasp on the job seemed tenuous from the start, with the Bucs drafting Josh Freeman in the first round. NFL Replay: Declining skills at the root of T.O.'s slow start
With pedominantly Arab Muslim populations, the govts of the Mahgreb are in tenuous control. Matthew Yglesias » All Alone
Americans have always had a tenuous relationship with the idea of eccentricity, unlike our forebears in England, where eccentrics occupy a hallowed part of the cultural fabric. Lesley M. M. Blume: Grey Gardens: What We Can Learn From The Edies
Unlike the concepts of justice and duty, which have deep roots in both ordinary language and everyday moral judgment, the idea of supererogation is only tenuously anchored in common moral discourse and the concept itself is a theoretical construct. How to Kill a Missionary
The sub - stance of these alienable privileges has been refined to a rapor; and the splendid evanescence, that remains, is nothing but the air-blown bubble of the school-boy, whose tenuous essence has scarce weight enough to gravitate, or density to rarify, and will vai. ish in a sun-beam, or dissolve at the touch. The works in verse and prose
The argument of Consumed is a barrage of small facts tenuously connected by undermotivated pet theories exhumed from the graveyard of 20th century social theory — Freud, Marcuse, Adorno, In Search of Higher Pleasures
He also shatters the (admittedly tenuous) illusion of an authentic folk album by overdubbing his voice on this track and many others.
Obviously the most problematic is the one about people who have unkempt or sloven appearances, which is not only highly subjective but also have only a tenuous at best relationship to potential misuse of firearms. The Volokh Conspiracy » Consumer Supremacy?
These are a form of personal pension where links to earnings or length of service are tenuous.
Assembled from various stabilizers, wing sections, nose cones, pipes, fuselage chunks, and other random parts, all held tenuously in place by an improvised web of twisted wire, the piece is a monument of stored energy.
The question of identity, the tenuous nature of self-understanding, and the seductions of self-delusion, are among her work's main themes.
From time to time Nora would materialize, discreet and tenuous. THREE KINDS OF KISSING - SCOTTISH SHORT STORIES
They only remind you of your tenuous grip on good health. Times, Sunday Times
Mars has a very tenuous atmosphere that is so transparent that the surface cools off dramatically at night.
This makes a strategy based on exurbs as they appear today - nearly all white and low density - a tenuous one.
Despite the tenuous nature of these links, professionals are obliged to advise and even persuade parents to follow the campaign's advice.
These cross-currents appear to have left the foreign exchange market in a state of tenuous equilibrium.
It helps, as it always does with sport, to have some kind of kindred bond with one of the teams, however tenuous that may be.
They are profligately displaying their power, including the power to abuse the House's tenuous-at-best policing of itself.
The tenuous link between food and buildings is the growing concern over food miles and their adverse affect on our environment, both natural and urban. Times, Sunday Times
So, while Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers remains tenuous, what isn't tenuous is Obama's relationship with the corrupt city, county, and state governments he calls home. Heavy turnout reported, few problems seen
Not only does it fall far short of the definition of the word tenuous, but it is kind of ironic to see the McCain campaign keep soiling their own in their desperation. McCain Campaign Now Attacks Michelle Obama Over Ayers
Bussard's "ramjet" design used magnetic fields generated by the craft to scoop up the tenuous gas of interstellar space. New Scientist - Online News
Every night, it seems we read of yet another instance of a local trader virtually forced out of business by the hike in car park charges or, however tenuous the link, the introduction of car parking charges during the evening.
But the fact that his confirmation was put on thin ice by such tenuous allegations concerns many activists.
He has a rather tenuous grasp of reality.
Naples has always had a tenuous and insecure grasp upon health and hygiene. Whicker's War
Ever since, she has always felt that she has a tenuous grip upon life.
I've always had my suspicions regarding Desmond's apparently tenuous hold on reality.
First Japan inched ahead to a tenuous lead holding it through the first half of the race.
From it beginnings this government has had a tenuous relationship with truth.
The tenuous suggestion that Stonehenge may thus be a sepulchral monument, is perhaps strengthened by the large number of burial mounds in the surrounding landscape.
This is evidence that buyers are enchanted by connections with the famous, however tenuous.
Brodde proffers me a few tenuous looking evergreen straps with a metal clip attached to them.
He has a rather tenuous grasp of reality.
The practice of democracy is tenuous and fragile - it requires ongoing attention and diligence.
Theirs is a tenuous enough link. Times, Sunday Times
The link between her family and the King's is rather tenuous.
Once or twice they plashed through tenuous streams trickling down through the salt marshes to the sea. His Disposition
The texture of the dish was simply beautiful - the crisp crab, the tongue-clinging cream, the gelatinous, tenuous tomato uniting into a cheery little song of sweet and light.
My point is rather that, because we are products of an affluent and leisured West, we have a special burden to remember how tenuous and fragile civilization remains outside our suburbs.
When the candidate for initiation sees (not merely believes, remember, but actually _sees_) that what has always before seemed to him empty space is in reality a solid mass of inconceivable density, and that the matter which has appeared to be the one tangible and certain basis of things is not only by comparison tenuous as gossamer (the "web" spun by "Father-Mother"), but is actually composed of emptiness and nothingness -- is itself the very negation of matter -- then for the first time he thoroughly appreciates the valuelessness of the physical senses as guides to the truth. Occult Chemistry Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements
Next door, in a small room to which day and night were the same, Mr. Pascoe was always to be found bending over his hobbing foot, under a tiny yellow fan of gaslight which could be heard making a tenuous shrilling whenever the bootmaker looked up, and ceased riveting. London River
It seems wantonly reckless to throw away even a tenuous link.
They use them to justify useless or dangerous treatments like injections of testosterone inhibitors or anti-inflammatory agents or loading up patients with intravenous immunoglobulin … treatments that have not been tested in any way, have not gone through clinical trials, and which are justified by tenuous connections to legitimate research, which sometimes contraindicates what the quacks are doing. Pharyngula
Netherland recognizes the tenuous nature of a self, that "fine white thread running, through years and years," and Hans flirts with the possibility that language may not precisely describe the world ( "I was assaulted by the notion, arriving in the form of a terrifying stroke of consciousness, that substance — everything of so called concreteness — was indistinct from its unnameable opposite"). Part 2: Netherland, Lyrical Realism, and the flip flops of Zadie Smith
In rereading my notes from these meetings I am reminded how tenuous the project was at its inception.
Like the fact that any news story making a splash causes ripples that, no matter how tenuous the medical connection, inevitably wash up in my surgery. Times, Sunday Times
Her only connection to the world a tenuous filament of wires, tubes and intravenous needles.
So the ‘agreement’ referred to in the AP story is tenuous, at best, and at worst, lacks a whole heap of context that renders it meaningless.
The script (co-written with fellow Boosh star Dave Brown) is almost entirely devoid of wit, featuring video clips of Eleanor swearing a lot about the glam-rock band Poison and of the moment – tenuously related to the show's groupie conceit – she was gazumped on Britain's Got Talent by Susan Boyle. Rich Fulcher: An Evening with Eleanor, the Tour Whore
The United Peace Alliance had only a tenuous connection with the organized Labour movement.
1577 to 1584 was an era of tenuous and fragile peace which could have been broken at any time.
The digital age puts musicians into a tenuous position. Times, Sunday Times
Here, we present 16 luscious females, each of whom has a tenuous link to football and ask: just who has the hottest totty?
There is no fragility or tenuousness to his character.
On the other hand, observation of extrasensory perception and psychokinesis is tenuous at best.
As for the others, there are about a dozen or so with whom a tenuous attachment may still persist. Times, Sunday Times
The unusual balancing act between chaos and domesticity represented in “War Spirit at Home” serves as a direct and poignant metaphor for the tenuous balance that the United States as a nation was struggling to achieve in the fractious post-bellum era, when Spencer completed this work. Unpacking Feminist Content in Lilly Martin Spencer’s “War Spirit at Home” « Gender Across Borders
Cleopatra, one of Taylor's gaudiest roles, does make a nice change from Susan B. Anthony or Willa Cather as a subject of feminist discussion, but the book's thesis is too tenuous, the evidence too sparse, to be persuasive. Women's Liz
W.B. Yeats connection with the house is tenuous indeed and hangs by the slender thread of his infatuation with Con and Eva.
In Forks, at the foot of the Olympic National Park, there are run-down trailer parks on the edges of the town, inhabited by "brushpickers," mostly Guatemalan, who make a tenuous living by scavenging in the woods for the moss, ferns, beargrass, and salal used by florists around the world to add greenery to bouquets. American Pastoral
We rush down the glacier solving its intricacies by interminable weaving, creeping over tenuous bridges, snowplowing desperately below the shrouded rock.
The tenuous material surrounding a comet is pushed away from the sun by radiation pressure and solar wind. A ‘bizzare star’, an incomplete explanation « Skulls in the Stars
From time to time Nora would materialize, discreet and tenuous. THREE KINDS OF KISSING - SCOTTISH SHORT STORIES
The cultural and historical links between the many provinces were seen to be very tenuous.
As such, memory is located also at this tenuous site of liminal existence; this point where internal becomes externalised, and the machine and body pass, converge or divert.
Yet even as I stood observing him, that tenuous foothold gave way and he slid backwards.
In some cases the connection is tenuous, but its list is by no means exhaustive. Times, Sunday Times
Plus, there's a decent barbecue menu and some bespoke extras to go with the films, which are divided into four (admittedly tenuous) weekly themes – specially made handkerchiefs for the weepies (Beaches, Brokeback Mountain, Terms Of Endearment), for example. This week's new film events
As for the others, there are about a dozen or so with whom a tenuous attachment may still persist. Times, Sunday Times
a tenuous thread
A succession of tutors was his only tenuous link with the larger world.
Yet even though Vancouver is known as the Amsterdam of the Pacific Northwest, reefer related businesses have a tenuous existence, operating as they do under the cloud of prohibition.
Her technique hinges on the unarticulated and the tenuously suggestive, even the subliminal.
In fact, of course, much of this material bore only a tenuous similarity to its genuinely customary counterparts.
The family link with her treasure, she says, is rather tenuous.
On a recent Newsweek cover, with the caption "God of All Things," President Obama was depicted as a multiarmed deity with a tenuous hold on his innumerable duties. Philip Goldberg: The Cosmic Dancer: Obama and Shiva
A tenuous peace deal between the American occupation forces and the embattled city of Falluja got off to a slow and sometimes chaotic start on Tuesday.
As a follow-up to Délassements culinaires, The Gastronomic Regenerator exhibits both the contradictions inherent in Soyer's status as would-be man of letters, and his efforts to make the most of this tenuous situation. Alexis Soyer and the Rise of the Celebrity Chef
The mind craves to make something perdurable out of something as tenuous as candlelight, something that becomes more and more itself through vicissitude.
The very subtle and tenuous substance of the Akashic Plane -- the term "etheric" may best describe the nature of this substance -- contains traces and impressions of all the happenings of the past of this earth; and such impressions may be read and seen by the clairvoyant who has developed sufficiently high powers of vision. Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers
Taken together, they impart a kind of tenuous concretion to the vague concept of nationhood.
At times the road seemed to be no more than a tenuous interface between massive swells of two very different natures - implacable ocean and eternal earth.
The connection is too tenuous to help. Times, Sunday Times
For a place so famous for its roads, Chaco is connected to the modern world tenuously at best: The only access is over washboard dirt roads that can turn to gumbo after a storm.
Five of the six miniatures represent couples, three of them in nocturnal landscapes, and their relationship to the text remains distinctly tenuous.
Last week I rambled on about tenuous arts performances in the High Street, but this week it got worse.
But between these fascinating detours is a lot of plodding self-referentiality, tenuous literary allusion and dull road trivia. The Times Literary Supplement
Nevertheless, the mountain goat maintains a tenuous but firm hold in its cruel environment, even though catastrophe is never far away.
a tenuous argument
The movie seems less like a bona-fide movie and more like a series of short comedy sketches connected by a tenuous thread of plot.
From its inception, the alliance was tenuous: concessions were made on all accounts in order for agreement to be reached among its intricately intermarried and perpetually embattled members. 161 Francesco Sforza, previously a condottiere employed by the Visconti, was installed as duke of Milan to protect the territory from possible dynastic claims made by the French king. Architecture and Memory: The Renaissance Studioli of Federico da Montefeltro
The link is pretty tenuous. Times, Sunday Times
The love of a bird for a caterpillar is a tenuous and passing attachment next to the bond between man and power. The Ugly Truth About Government « Isegoria
Women were banned from competing and spectating at the original Games, and shot put is barely 100 years old, so the direct linkage with the ancient past was tenuous.
his works tenuously survive in the minds of a few scholars
Only the deeper contrast of the figure differentiates it from the vegetation and tenuously relegates the forest to a safe atmospheric distance.
The consumer crusader had secured a tenuous spot on the ballot after gaining the Reform Party's nomination last spring, but Circuit Judge Kevin Davey in Tallahassee issued a temporary order late Wednesday siding with Democrats, who contend the party of Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan is a shadow of its former self. September 2004
The People's Republic's claim to de iure sovereignty is tenuous, at best ludicrous and desperate in some of the arguments the CCP seeks to rely on. Lung Yingtai Waves About Meaningless Statistics, Declares Sovereignty of Sealand
His works tenuously survive in the minds of a few scholars.
Do these people understand just how tenuous is the existance of the average small business? Matthew Yglesias » Bringing People Together
The United Peace Alliance had only a tenuous connection with the organized Labour movement.
At the moment the links are tenuous. EMOTIONAL ROLLERCOASTER: A Journey Through the Science of Feelings
She might be right, but the connection seems tenuous. Times, Sunday Times
The reader experiences a suite of poems that is vaguely reminiscent of the famous Romantics, but verging into unknown and tenuous territory.
The basis for this contention among British doctors seems even more tenuous.
But his Lordship did not regard that as having more than a tenuous link with respect for family life. Times, Sunday Times
Unforgiving dry, and tempestuous rainy seasons ensure that mankind's foothold here will forever be tenuous.
Brown warned the world that they have '50 days to save my career', and said that he faces a catastrophic future of tragic opinion polls, election defeats and global ignominy if world leaders don't come up with ways of convincing the world he isn't a bumbling, half-blind, gibbering loon with a grasp on reality that is tenuous at best. Brown: World has '50 Days to Save My Career'
The kinship the narrator feels between himself and the woman is a tenuous pretext for such a quest. The Times Literary Supplement
These cross-currents appear to have left the foreign exchange market in a state of tenuous equilibrium.
How will you live your life in tenuous circumstances? Istanbul v2.0
Astronomical observations suggest that the Sun is presently moving through a warm, tenuous interstellar cloud made of dust and gas, one of several that make up our local galactic neighbourhood.
The ideal of tolerance and sympathy, therefore, could be extremely tenuous and fragile.
This is similar to a tenuous dust cloud on Earth, visible only from the light it scatters or absorbs.
But this support is clearly conditional and tenuous, even if that's never explicitly stated by either party.
The application needed to be built quickly and cheaply because constraints in the purchasing and tenuous acquisition processes ruled out any new requisitions until the beginning of the next fiscal quarter.
Today, I shall mostly be counting minutes, and considering the tenuous link between the words ‘delay’ and ‘deadline.’
The tenuous cloud floats near the volcano's mouth, as if in prelude to an eruption. A Space in Time
For now, the band's travel plans are tenuous.
It would seem to be towards the edge of the power, if at all, and if it were within it, the particular thing might be regarded as insubstantial, tenuous or distant.
In some cases the connection is tenuous, but its list is by no means exhaustive. Times, Sunday Times
If there's just a single disarticulated bone in the site, then it becomes more tenuous.
The NY Times is mentioning a tenuous New York link but most cases have originated in Asia.
Bloom is an archetype of the modern protagonist, marginal, in a sense deracinated, tenuously connected to his culture.
The tie [with design isomorphism] is still exceedingly tenuous at the genetic level A Dubious "Opportunity" for IDers
The earliest settlers had little time for aesthetic pursuits during their first decades of hewing out a tenuous fingerhold on the North American mainland.
The tour was in its third year and we were in a very tenuous position. Times, Sunday Times
He followed her progress almost as much by imagination as by perception, but even through such tenuous tracking he could tell that she was moving with unwonted deliberation.
The recoveries in Asia, as we all really know - though we pretend otherwise - are very, very tenuous.
However, the nature of working-class employment, emergent expectations for nurturant fathers, and issues over substance abuse for the unique sample in Indiana placed these successful providers in a tenuous position.
The tension is a purely musical one, a question of being right there with the musicians as they navigate this tenuous territory of delicate interaction.

How To Use Tenuous In A Sentence

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