The earliest watches — imprecise things, with only an hour hand — were considered jewelry and were worn as pendants or brooches.
Institutions certainly matter, but the full measurement of their sufficiency reflects some maddeningly imprecise things, such as public perception of them, and whether, at any given moment, the urgency of reform outweighs the inertia of the status quo.
The simple truth is that prejudice, racism, xenophobia, ignorance, are all by definition imprecise things when it comes down to specific acts of violence.
My word-fishing has irritated me to the point that instead of moving on and settling for a more imprecise word ("thing" is a tempting stand-in), I sometimes stop and wallow in my frustration, even soliciting the help of my listener.
Mistuned instruments, lopsided mixes, low-fi microphones, expressively imprecise timing: those are things Portishead prizes from the analog era and brings to its own recordings, which sound ever more peculiar alongside albums relying on computer-quantized rhythms and auto-tuned voices.
Economic forecasting is necessarily imprecise: too many things happen for forecasters to be able to foresee all of them.
This imprecise modifier left things vague and open to the likelihood that a visitor still would accept the cabin as the True Cross.
"God" is an imprecise name for the only thing in the universe that actually exists.
The task of determining the success of wetland restoration has long been challenging and sometimes contentious because success is an imprecise term that means different things in different situations and to different people.
Spoken language is imprecise, and people under stress often say things that mask the real things they'd like to say.
