Sometimes, after initially walking the dog, you are eventually run ragged (forced to overbid).
Only an eleventh hour cavalry charge by the Knights of the Vale – reinforcements mustered by Littlefinger at Sansa's request – saved Jon's ragged forces from being carved up into anonymous sausagemeat inside Ramsay's murderous ring of steel.
In the 20 years since New York State began requiring a five-cent deposit on cans and bottles, a ragged work force of thousands of collectors has become a familiar backdrop in the city, scuffling along the streets with shopping carts and plastic bags.
But the allied air campaign was again unable to keep the military from pressing the rebels, as had been the case throughout a week of fighting that saw the ragged opposition forces losing their footholds on the main coastal road, including the city of Brega.
This show is spectacle incarnate, Cecil B. DeMille meets P. T. Barnum, with monumental sets and glitter, acrobats, a magnificent Chinese dragon and a large, ragged chorus, forced down to the lip of the orchestra pit by the sets (which, with their risers, steps and pagodas, offer the masses little actual room to stand) and by the cruel minions of the princess Turandot.
The ceasefire, complains Israel, is only partly effective, yet Mr Abbas, fearful of a popular backlash, will not order his still-ragged security forces to disarm militants.
The new arrivals were cleanshaven, well fed and heavily armed, a marked contrast with the ragged, ill-equipped force that General Dallaire had battled his own headquarters to arm, shelter and feed.
Humanitarian missions and peacekeeping assignments ran forces ragged.
While the estate's ragged bestiary was forced to live in cramped outdoor quarters, Prince was slavishly tended to indoors by a sycophantic bulldog, Winston, and scores of human servants, who dropped everything at the tinkling of his bell.
Louis-Philippe gorges on the coins his ragged subjects have been forced to give.
