Sometimes letting the cat/kitten come to you will make you seem dependable TO your cat/kitten.
It provides structure, an institution that seems safe and dependable, where there are resolutions and remedies to all of life's varied conflicts.
This, combined with feral, broad-chested good looks, seemed a dependable recipe for stardom.
And Ms. Eaglen, whose natural gifts are glorious but whose technique never seemed completely dependable, had been giving some shaky performances.
That refuge had seemed reasonably dependable, at least until a week ago, when Lee Bo became the fifth member of a Hong Kong-based publishing house specializing in provocative tomes about Beijing leaders to vanish mysteriously, not on a trip to the mainland but from his own home city, Hong Kong.
That said, I think that the other tools of statecraft -- ranging from development aid to people-to-people exchanges, digital diplomacy to media focused on human rights, all of this -- are appropriate and important, even if the results seem less dependable than what some (misguidedly) think can be achieved by sending in troops and tanks. .
Accusing your opponent of being "soft on crime" "no longer seems to be the dependable political cudgel it once was," reported the online journalism nonprofit The Marshall Project last year. .
Wilson seems to have mislaid his dependable good cheer, or else traded it for a lonely ruefulness; he really needs someone (one of his old partners, maybe, like Vince Vaughn or Ben Stiller) to bounce his lines off.
Once-dependable Turkey seems in danger of implosion.
Even after training the speech engine a few times, it doesn't seem quite as dependable as when you're actually on the homescreen.
