4 examples of smatterings in sentences
I have sometimes doubted whether an obscure farmer's daughter is any happier with her piano, and her piles of cheaply illustrated literature and translations of French novels, and her smatterings of science learned in normal schools, since she has learned too often to despise her father and mother and brother, and her uneducated rural beau, and all her surroundings, with poverty and unrest and aspiration for society eating out her soul.
Literary newspapers, since they print the daily smatterings of commonplace people, are especially a cunning means for robbing from the aesthetic public the time which should be devoted to the genuine productions of art for the furtherance of culture.
Care must be taken that this "reading up" on a subject does not fill our minds with smatterings of ideas that we think we understand because we can remember the language in which they were expressed; but reading, supplemented by thinking, may enable us to write well about a subject concerning which on first thought we seem to know but little.
It is true that I was fairly conversant with French and German, and could express my wants in Russian, Roumanian, Bulgarian, Spanish, Turkish, Hindustanee, Pushtoo, and Burmese, every word of which smatterings I have long since forgotten.