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• s  worn to shreds; or wearing torn or ragged clothing
  a man in a tattered shirt
  the tattered flag
  tied up in tattered brown paper
  a tattered barefoot boy
• s  ruined or disrupted
  a tattered remnant of its former strength
  my torn and tattered past

• Sharing his fervor, his tattered guerrillas vaulted daunting obstacles to crush France's desperate attempt to retrieve its empire in Indochina; later, built into a largely .
• The Polos arrived in Venice "clad in tattered Tartar clothes," writes the scholar Frances Wood, "ragged and unrecognizable, bereft of all possessions save rubies and emeralds sewn .
• Every few weeks, outside the movie theater in virtually any American town in the late 1910s, stood the life-size cardboard figure of a small tramp outfitted in tattered, baggy .

• tatterdemalion
• shattered

News & Articles

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• Dignified end to torn, tattered
  MORTON — Thirty-nine worn, tattered American flags will be “destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning” Saturday, just as the U.S. Flag Code recommends.
  June 15, 2013 - Peoria Journal Star
• Wind hinders Flag Day ceremony
  The tattered American flags scheduled to be retired by fire on Flag Day didn't get their final send off. As the American, state and flags of the VFW and American Legion flapped in a strong north wind from atop the flag poles at Willows Memorial Hall...
  June 15, 2013 - Orland Press Register
• Upgrade boosts Groupon
  Groupon shares, which have been tattered since the daily deals company went public 19 months ago, spiked 11.5 percent yesterday after one analyst said it was making progress in mobile. Ross Sandler, an analyst at Deutsche Bank, raised his rating on the Chicago-based company to a buy and his...
  June 15, 2013 - New York Post

Quotes

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• Mr Blackwell in The West Australian
  Third on the worst-dressed list was former wonder twin, Mary Kate Olsen, whose style was described as resembling "a tattered toothpick-trapped in a hurricane" and fourth was another songstress, Fergie, who Blackwell said was "couture chaos".
• Morgan Tsvangirai in Africasia
  We are not going to patch up the tattered economy,Tsvangirai said. "The economy has been destroyed to such an extent that we need to start afresh." "Zimbabwe is one of the world's great humanitarian crises. We need food, drugs and...
• Leonard Pitts in The Free Lance-Star (blog)
  As Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts wrote recently, anonymous online forums "have become havens for a level of crudity, bigotry, meanness and plain nastiness that shocks the tattered remnants of our propriety."