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Haphazard   Listen
adjective
haphazard  adj.  Determined by chance, whimsy, or guesswork; unplanned; aimless; random; used mostly of human actions.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Haphazard" Quotes from Famous Books



... continue until a "phonetic sense" is established. Not all children can readily blend sounds and "hear the word." Patient drill for weeks, even months, may be necessary before a sense of phonetic values is attained. Haphazard and spasmodic work is fatal to progress; but a few minutes of brisk, lively drill, given regularly each day will ...
— How to Teach Phonics • Lida M. Williams

... upon her. Hers was a nature with a wide range. It is probable that every conceivable impulse was latent in her, every possibility of good or evil. Exactly which would predominate depended upon the influences of these early years; and almost all the influences she came under were haphazard. There was no intelligent direction of her thoughts, no systematic training to form good habits. Her brothers were sent to school as soon as they were old enough, and so had the advantage of regular routine and strict discipline from the first; but a couple of hours a day for lessons was considered ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... uncouth bluster; sentences without commencements running to abrupt endings and smoke, like waves against a sea-wall, learned dictionary words giving a hand to street-slang, and accents falling on them haphazard, like slant rays from driving clouds; all the pages in a breeze, the whole book producing a kind of electrical agitation in the mind and the joints. This was its effect on the lady. To her the incomprehensible was the abominable, for she ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... mound in question apparently at haphazard; all the mounds presenting nearly a uniform outline, differing only in size and mostly circular in form, and from twenty to twenty-four feet at the base, rising to a height of eight feet and under. A trench ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various

... invisible to each other. I followed behind MacRae more or less mechanically, though I was, in a way, acutely conscious of the necessity for stealthy going, one part of my mind busy turning over the quick march of events and guessing haphazard ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... names tend to be phonetic and haphazard. Eg Pensanz, Pensans, Pensants, Pensance, and Penzance are all the ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew

... ferocious, boiling-up pale flash showed upon the slender body of the ship the toppling rush, the downfall, and the seething mad scurry of each wave. Never for a moment could she shake herself clear of the water; Jukes, rigid, perceived in her motion the ominous sign of haphazard floundering. She was no longer struggling intelligently. It was the beginning of the end; and the note of busy concern in Captain MacWhirr's voice sickened him like an exhibition of blind and ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad

... the East and West, the main feature of the town was the street car. It was an open-air structure of spacious dimensions, as though benches and a canopy had been erected rather haphazard on a small dancing platform. The track is absurdly narrow in gauge; and as a consequence the edifice swayed and swung from side to side. A single mule was attached to it loosely by about ten feet of rope. It was driven by a gaudy ragamuffin ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White

... should be above mediocrity. On the score of natural abilities, however—in quickness of perception, facility in generalization, readiness and coherence of expression, and clearness of head generally—it would not be at haphazard one could find an equal number of boys in any English school ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various

... and resistance to law, and supplied there the yet more disastrous facility of sustaining and enforcing wrong under the name of giving support to public tranquillity. Yet, forcing on its way amidst all these difficulties by a natural law, in a strange haphazard and disjointed method, and by a zigzag movement, there came into existence, and by degrees into steady operation, a sentiment native to Ireland and having Ireland for its vital basis, and yet not deserving the name of Irish patriotism, because its care was not for a nation, but for a sect. ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.

... municipal funds, had left the two-hundred-acre square of the park pretty much as nature made it; that is to say, there was no ornate parking, no attempt at landscape gardening. Ancient maples spread their crooked arms untrimmed, standing in haphazard groves. Wherever the greensward nourished, there grew pink-tipped daisies and kindred flowers of the wild. It was gutted in the middle with a ravine, the lower end of which, dammed by an earth embankment, formed a lake with the inevitable swans ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... read to the end when the letter was taken from him. Indeed to inclose such a note in a dispatch sure to be opened en famille was one of Griffith's haphazard proceedings, which arose from the present being always much more to him than the absent. Clarence was much shocked at hearing these last sentences, and exclaimed, 'He meant it in confidence, papa; I implore you to treat it ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge

... old this hebdomadal consciousness was already borne upon her. Into her earliest vocabulary, as haphazard as if the words had been dished up out of the alphabet of a vermicelli soup, crept the word "Sunday," mysteriously boiled down to "Nunk," the first time her mother heard it, the pride seeming to crowd around ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst

... modern English when he liked, and usually did so, but, and in this he resembled others of his kind, in times of excitement he used the older form which is still the tongue of Lancashire. I made some haphazard answer, but it seemed appropriate, for Alice smiled upon us as we shook hands heartily. When I turned toward her a feeling of pity came upon me—she looked so wan and frail. Still her eyes were bright with good-will, and her voice seemed to ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss

... never would have heard of London; for that would be supposing in a Roman at the close of the first or the commencement of the second century of our aera a geographical knowledge more minute than that of the President of the Royal Geographical Society, unless at the haphazard mention of any particular village in the newly annexed Fiji Islands, Sir Henry Rawlinson could enter into a correct account of its chief characteristic. But if we are to go to the extreme length of supposing ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross

... other room, and had soon puzzled out the method of replacing the cylinders by others. As he did so, it came into his mind that it must be these little appliances had fixed the language so that it was still clear and understandable after two hundred years. The haphazard cylinders he substituted displayed a musical fantasia. At first it was beautiful, and then it was sensuous. He presently recognised what appeared to him to be an altered version of the story of Tannhauser. The music was unfamiliar. But the rendering was ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells

... theory of Arrhenius explains electrolysis very simply. The ions which, so to speak, wander about haphazard, and are uniformly distributed throughout the liquid, steer a regular course as soon as we dip in the trough containing the electrolyte the two electrodes connected with the poles of the dynamo or generator of electricity. Then the charged positive ions travel in the ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare

... saying that a motor tour should be planned in advance as carefully as possible. If one starts out in a haphazard way, it takes him a long time to find his bearings, and much valuable time is lost. Before crossing the water, it would be well to become posted as thoroughly as possible on what one desires to see and to gain a general idea of the road from ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy

... their hair in trailing wet wisps and short uneven skirts dripping on the pavements, gaunt children in scant haphazard garb surged across the broad avenue or with shrill admonishments stood in isolated helpless patches amid the swift and shining ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer

... that Softswan had selected was not picked up at haphazard. It was deliberately chosen as being less deadly than the others, the charge being a few slugs or clippings of lead, which were not so apt to kill as rifle bullets; for Softswan, as her name might ...
— The Prairie Chief • R.M. Ballantyne

... then, if properly defined, have a correlative. I add this condition because, if that to which they are related is stated as haphazard and not accurately, the two are not found to be interdependent. Let me state what I mean more clearly. Even in the case of acknowledged correlatives, and where names exist for each, there will be no interdependence if one of the two is denoted, not by that name which ...
— The Categories • Aristotle

... having been summoned two by two, as we have just said, filed in the parlor before the police agents, and then they were ordered to get into the "robbers' box." The stowage was apparently made at haphazard and promiscuously; nevertheless, later, by the difference of the treatment accorded to the Representatives in the various prisons, it was apparent that this promiscuous loading had perhaps been somewhat prearranged. When the first vehicle was ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo

... piano, bathed in the red glow struck out of the velvet cover by a strong golden ray. With this red glow the smoke of the cigarette mingled lightly as the talking and laughter mingled with the chords Barbarella Viti struck haphazard on the keys. Ludovico whispered a word or two in his cousin's ear, which the Princess forthwith communicated to her friends, for there was a renewed burst of laughter, ringing and deep, like a string of pearls dropping into a silver ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio

... consisted of no less than six dozen judges, or, as the Act styled them, "Commissioners," from whose decisions there was no appeal whatever. These Commissioners were at first chosen from the ratepayers in a haphazard style, no mental or property qualification whatever being required, though afterwards it was made incumbent that they should be possessed of an income from real estate to value of L50 per year, or be worth L1,000 personalty. From ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell

... practices, about which he knows as little as the islanders themselves. Having had little time, and scarcely any opportunity, to become acquainted with the customs he pretends to describe, he writes them down one after another in an off-hand, haphazard style; and were the book thus produced to be translated into the tongue of the people of whom it purports to give the history, it would appear quite as wonderful to them as it does to the American ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville

... well in the story itself as in its conciseness, and the resemblance it bore to those of the books of chivalry. She said that she had many times amused herself reading them; but that she did not know the situation of the provinces or seaports, and so she had said at haphazard that she had landed ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... in the autumn of 1752 that Goldsmith arrived in Edinburgh. His outset in that city came near adding to the list of his indiscretions and disasters. Having taken lodgings at haphazard, he left his trunk there, containing all his worldly effects, and sallied forth to see the town. After sauntering about the streets until a late hour, he thought of returning home, when, to his confusion, he found he had not acquainted himself with the ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving

... still be wrong. But of course the wisest man in the world would have too much sense to be a censor. We are not dealing with him. His substitutes are distinctly lesser folk. They are not even trained for their work except in the most haphazard manner. Obviously a censor should be the most profound of psychologists. Instead the important posts in the agencies of suppression go to the boy who can capture the largest number of smutty post cards. After he has confiscated a few gross he is promoted to ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam

... pieces on every spin of the ball is a man who means business; and the dilettanti soon let me press through to a stool at the table. Going on pair and impair or the colour was not to my taste. Either luck was going to stand by me that evening, or I was going to be broke; so I planked my money haphazard on four numbers every time, and didn't handicap myself with a system. I'd a distinct suspicion that the bank had even a greater pull than was apparent on the surface; but there was no chance of investigation, and I submitted to the fact that chances all-told stood about two ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

... than the impression of the music itself, is that grave, regulated motion of the actors. As I have said elsewhere, no actor makes a gesture which has not been regulated for him; there is none of that unintelligent haphazard known as being "natural"; these people move like music, or with that sense of motion which it is the business of painting to arrest. But here, of course, I am speaking of the poetic drama, of drama which does not aim at the realistic representation of modern ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons

... his philosophical points, however, dagger or no dagger, wherever they take him. By putting himself into the trick of singularity, and affecting to be a mere compound of eccentricities and oddities, neither knowing nor caring what it is that he is writing about, and dashing at haphazard into anything as the fit takes him,—'Let us e'en fly at anything,' says Hamlet,—by assuming, in short, the disguise of the elder Brutus; and, on account of a similar necessity, there is no saying what he cannot be allowed to utter with impunity. Under such a cover it is, that he inserts ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... to table and arrived at Craven and his macaroni. She looked surprised, then sent him a brilliant smile, turned quickly and spoke to Lady Sellingworth. The latter then also looked towards Craven, smiled kindly, and bowed with the careless, haphazard grace ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens

... intellectual type. His hair was thick, short, and flaxen. He possessed neither a sorb nor a third arm—so presumably he was not a native of Ifdawn. His forehead, however, was disfigured by what looked like a haphazard assortment of eyes, eight in number, of different sizes and shapes. They went in pairs, and whenever two were in use, it was indicated by a peculiar shining—the rest remained dull, until their turn came. In addition to the upper eyes he had ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay

... her house, and still there was no sign of her ahead, nor was there any conclusion in my mind. And then I chanced to look round and saw her hastening after me, about a couple of hundred yards away. I wheeled round and on the instant leapt to one of my typical haphazard decisions. I would simply show her the pocket book and see ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston

... speculative, dicey. Adv. randomly, by chance, fortuitously; unpredictably, unforeseeably; casually &c. 156; unintentionally &c. adj.; unwittingly. en passant[Fr], by the way, incidentally; as it may happen; at random, at a venture, at haphazard. Phr. acierta errando[Lat]; dextro tempore[Lat]; "fearful concatenation of circumstances" [D. Webster]; "fortuitous combination of circumstances" [Dickens]; le jeu est le fils d'avarice et le pere ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... keeping house in a haphazard way, with no responsibility attached to any one but Julie and me. Now, each day there must be some sort of regulations and punishments, if duties are neglected. The fire yesterday showed me that that ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy

... in which Miss Burgoyne regarded his intercession on behalf of Mr. Percival Miles was removed, and that in a most summary fashion, by the young lady herself. As they were about to leave the hotel, the men were standing about in the hall, chatting at haphazard or lighting a fresh cigar, while they waited for the women-folk to get ready. Lionel saw Miss Burgoyne coming along the corridor, and was glad of the chance of saying good-night to her before she got on to the front of Lord Denysfort's drag. But it was not good-night that ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black

... no troublesome colours to lay on; It can't have fatigued him, no, not in the least; A dash here and there with a haphazard crayon, And there stands the wrinkled-skinned, ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... where her father, perhaps a gentleman, had gone to seek his bread, and where he was stifled by obscurity, she returned alone and at haphazard into France. She landed at La Rochelle, and was received in pity by Madame de Neuillant, mother of the Marechale Duchesse de Navailles, and was reduced by that avaricious old woman to keep the keys of her granary, and to see the hay measured ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon

... subject as improper and immodest, and the first lesson the child learns is to associate the idea of shame with the sexual organs; and, since he is not enlightened by his natural instructors, he picks up his knowledge of the sex function in a haphazard way from ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various

... things just as he finds them would make as great a mistake as he who framed his plans in complete disregard of what soil, climate, etc., permit. One of the evils of an abstract or remote external aim in education is that its very inapplicability in practice is likely to react into a haphazard snatching at immediate conditions. A good aim surveys the present state of experience of pupils, and forming a tentative plan of treatment, keeps the plan constantly in view and yet modifies it as conditions develop. The aim, in short, is experimental, ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey

... passages used merely for display, and says that he has striven to show how they can be turned to artistic uses. He deprecates the employment of contrapuntal device for its own sake, and says that he employs it only infrequently and to fill out middle voices. He forcefully condemns all haphazard use of vocal resources and says that the singer should labor to penetrate the meaning and passion of that which he sings and to convey it to the hearer. This he asserts can never be accomplished by ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson

... experimented in a rather haphazard fashion, connecting this and that wire blindly and by guesswork, in the hope that he would strike the right combination. Then he thought the combination might be right and there was a lack of power; so he added other lines of wire to his ...
— The Master Key - An Electrical Fairy Tale • L. Frank Baum

... got out of the way at last in a haphazard fashion, and the Second and Third Divisions were also steadily moving, but hours behind time. Such marching! It reminded one of countrymen streaming along a road to a ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe

... proposals could become ways of directing it. They could, but will they? Without the habit of mind which sees substitution as the essence of statecraft, without a philosophy which makes the invention of moral equivalents its goal, I for one refuse to see in these recommendations anything more than a haphazard shooting which has accidentally hit the mark. Moreover, I have a deep suspicion that I have tried to read into the proposals more than the Commission intended. Certainly these constructions occupy an insignificant amount of space in the body of the report. On all sides of them is a mass of ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann

... that not one of these envelopes had ever been opened. While that dear heart, now at rest, was pouring forth her love and sorrow to the ears that should have been above all others ready to receive them, her letters, as they arrived, were flung uncared for, unread, even unopened, into any haphazard receptacle. ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner

... interpreter; a French creole, one of those haphazard wights of Gallic origin who abound upon our frontiers, living among the Indians like one of their own race. He had been twenty years among the Arickaras, had a squaw and troop of piebald children, and officiated as interpreter to the chiefs. ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving

... were arranged haphazard, and showed that Bias possessed more wisdom than care in the use of duster ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... upon the American army—or rather armies—was one of dismay. The result was confusion. In fact, no study of the battle can fail to impress the examiner with the belief that outside the redoubt the whole conduct of the Americans was haphazard. Except for Stark's regiment, which itself came on in detachments, the reinforcements dribbled to the field in companies, platoons, or squads. They placed themselves where the hasty judgment of Putnam directed them, or if he was absent to beat up for more troops, ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French

... ran over Peggy's case in his mind, and could see no flaw in it. In the old days haphazard marriages were rather the rule than the exception, and such things as registers were never heard of in far-out parts. His trained mind, going through the various questions that a cross-examiner would ask, and supplying the ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson

... clings haphazard to the steep bank of the Tyne, and spreads away up and beyond it, reaching out towards Wallsend on the river shore and Tynemouth along by the sea, the older parts by the river looking black and grimy to the last degree; but there is a silver lining to this very black cloud—not visible, it ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry

... of my coevals at Goudhurst and Wimblehurst, I was not even warned against quite horrible dangers. My ideas were made partly of instinct, partly of a romantic imagination, partly woven out of a medley of scraps of suggestion that came to me haphazard. I had read widely and confusedly "Vathek," Shelley, Tom Paine, Plutarch, Carlyle, Haeckel, William Morris, the Bible, the Freethinker, the Clarion, "The Woman Who Did,"—I mention the ingredients that come first to mind. All sorts of ideas were jumbled up in ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... in an ideal man. There is an intuition deep in ourselves of our higher possibilities. The feeling that better things are possible inspires all human endeavor. Movement merely for the sake of movement, mere haphazard practice, without an ideal, accomplishes but little. We want not only an instinctive ideal but we want one which is the ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry

... a hand and, of course, describing carefully the appearance of a victim's body, the wounds, the position, the expression of the face, any tearing or disorder of the garments. Many times these quick, haphazard jottings, made in the precious moments immediately following a crime, had proved of incalculable value ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett

... others from the street. If you will go farther you must climb a ladder which brings you to the roof that is used as the sitting-room or door-yard of the next room. From this room you may still ascend to others, or you may pass through low and small door-ways to other apartments. It is all haphazard, but exceedingly picturesque. You may find some of the family in every room, or they may be gathered, women and babies, on a roof which is protected by a parapet. At the time of our visit the men were all away at work ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner

... Mitchell's; Miss Barnes, the fresh assistant mistress, was to take the Fourth; and the teaching of the three lower forms would be shared by Miss Hopkins, Mademoiselle, and Miss Fanny Pollard. Lessons, on a first morning, are usually more or less haphazard, but at any rate a beginning was made, the pupils were entered on their class registers, their capacities were tested, and they began in some slight degree to know their teachers. Before the school separated at 12.30 for dinner Miss Pollard had an ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil

... no one in the lane, and there was no sign of life when I reached what I must call the village, though the word conveys a wrong idea, for there is no street, merely a cottage here and there, dropped haphazard, and situated without regard to its aspect. These cottages lie all on one's left hand; to the right a stretch of grass soon merges into bracken and bush, and then the beech woods enclose both, and surge down into the valley and rise up again beyond, a great wave of ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford

... put the stirrup correctly on the foot of his young mistress before starting out with her for a quiet ride, but these men naturally know nothing about the correct length of the stirrup leather, and during the ride the stirrup may come out of the foot and be caught haphazard by the rider, with the result that, should she become unseated and thrown from her saddle by her horse suddenly shying with her, she may be dragged and killed. I therefore cannot too strongly recommend all mothers to see that their daughters' saddles are provided with reliable safety ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes

... detail and with still greater precision, dealing with them in sections, as parts of a homogeneous whole. The draperies are now laid with infinite care on to the living model, and are made to approximate as closely as possible to the arrangement given in the first sketch, which, as it was not haphazard, but most carefully worked out, must of necessity be adhered to. They have often to be drawn piecemeal, as a model cannot by any means always retain the attitude sufficiently long for the design to be wholly carried out at one cast. This arrangement is effected with special ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys

... but fantastically heroic. When I recall the personalities of the various Poles I have known (and I have known a great many), I cannot conceive of a phrase more exquisitely descriptive. It makes all your haphazard knowledge about Poland significant and valuable by supplying you with a key to its interpretation. It is this faculty Dr. Brandes has displayed in an eminent degree in his many biographical and critical essays which have appeared in German and Danish periodicals; as also in his more elaborate ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... governmental bodies to get off the dime and get going—rescue those people, or, cynically, at least make a show of action to quell the flood of telegrams. E.H.Q. resisted the pressures in favor of doing a workmanlike job in preparation for a genuine rescue instead of a haphazard show, but was mindful of ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton

... colorists. Dupre sees nature through a prism. Diaz's groups of dames and gallants have a jewel-like aspect; they leave the same impression as a tangle of ribbons, a bunch of exotic flowers, a heap of gems flung together with the felicity of haphazard. In general, and when they are in most completely characteristic mood, it is not the sentiment of nature that one gets from the work of either painter. It is not even their sentiment of nature—the emotion aroused in their susceptibilities by natural phenomena. What one gets ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell

... general, and nothing further occurred to disturb the harmony and hilarity of the party—only Errington seemed somewhat abstracted, and answered many questions that were put to him at haphazard, without knowing, or possibly caring, whether his replies were intelligible or incoherent. His thoughts were dreamlike and brilliant with fairy sunshine. He understood at last what poets meant by their melodious musings, woven into golden threads of song—he seemed to have grasped ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli

... that he made his work into the singular mixture that it is, of rambling narrative, disconnected incident, capricious disquisition, and coarse humour. That, no doubt, was the very manner in which his mind worked; and the essential element of his spirit resides precisely in this haphazard and various looseness. His exceeding coarseness is itself an expression of one of the most fundamental qualities of his mind—its jovial acceptance of the physical facts of life. Another side of the same characteristic ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey

... convenient trysting-place is the west end of the nave. Our purpose in the following pages is to picture a morning spent in the Abbey with a party of tourists, who have been collected in a somewhat haphazard manner before a start is made, and are now assembled beneath the statue of the younger Pitt. Although the majority are probably of British and American nationality with a sprinkling no doubt of our colonial brothers, in the minority will very likely be found ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith

... in the United States alone six hundred millions of dollars are expended in advertising the sale of commodities, and for the most part expended in a haphazard, experimental and unscientific way. The investment of this vast sum with risk of perhaps total loss, or even possible injury, through the faulty construction or improper placing of advertisements should stimulate the interest of every advertiser ...
— The Trained Memory • Warren Hilton

... had been content to travel in this haphazard way, and it was long before he would acknowledge the benefits of a compass and map. That he could travel straight there was no gainsaying, for if, as I sometimes did, I pointed out our line and sent him ahead, he would go as straight as a die, with now and then a glance at the sun, and ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie

... attain to anything of value at haphazard; but must deliberately choose and train ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair

... and that of his readers, the profoundly important crisis in the midst of which we are living. The moral and social dissolution in progress about us, and the enormous peril of sailing blindfold and haphazard, without rudder or compass or chart, have always been fully visible to him, and it is no fault of his if they have not become equally plain to his contemporaries. The policy of drifting has had no countenance from him. That a society should be likely to last with hollow and scanty ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley

... employ him again; but the people, seeing themselves without a leader, took him haphazard, just as a man, who is naked, springs upon the first ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al

... year he again basked in the indulgences of home-life. His father's business interests had no appeal for him, but the personal influence of a young doctor, with his vivid tales of medical-college experiences, and the struggling within of a never recognized ambition, with some haphazard suggestions from his mother, ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll

... even without making allowance for what has been called the stock character of mediaeval composition. That almost all are directly imitated from the French is probable enough, that most are is certain: but this matters, for our purpose, nothing at all. That the imitation was not haphazard or indiscriminate is obvious. Thus, though we have some, we have not very many representatives of the class which was the most numerous of all in France—the chansons de geste or stories of French legendary history, ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury

... spread out over all the ground we could cover and shouted continually, in the hope that he would hear us and answer. We made a complete circuit of the portion of the run in his charge, and, finding no traces of him, we struck off haphazard across the middle of it. We kept up our shouting and ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox

... me. What the scheme as a whole is I do not know; with my limited mind I cannot know. There I become a Mystic. I use the word scheme because it is the best word available, but I strain it in using it. I do not wish to imply a schemer, but only order and co-ordination as distinguished from haphazard. "All this is important, all this is profoundly significant." I say it of the universe as a child that has not learnt to read might say it of a parchment agreement. I cannot read the universe, but I can believe ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells

... haphazard recital, waving his cigarette now and then for emphasis, and conversing frequently over his shoulder while Rue Carew leaned on the piano and gravely watched his nimble fingers alternately punish and caress ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers

... of the million, and her influence was felt far beyond the city's radius. Even among some of the highest and wealthiest classes of society this peculiar appellation of "Lotys," carrying no surname with it, and spoken at haphazard had the effect of causing a sudden silence, and the interchange of questioning looks among those who heard it, and who, without knowing who she was, or what her aims in life really were, voted her "dangerous." Those among the superior ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... mentioned is provided for. Joe is instructed to answer any haphazard questioner, that he is bringing the load to me, which will ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth

... was one of wild beauty. It wound up a desolate mountain pass along which great black boulders were scattered haphazard like the mighty toys of a giant. The glittering snow lay all around them, making their nakedness the more apparent. And far, far above, the white crags shone with a dazzling purity ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell

... comfort could be secured with it. But the little battery with its metal plates in a weak solution proved a perennial reservoir of electrical energy, safe and controllable, from which supplies could be drawn at will. That which was wild had become domesticated; regular crops took the place of haphazard gleanings from brake or prairie; the possibility of electrical ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin

... without its use. Easy enough, indeed, is the ordinary practice of experiment, which is either a mere repetition or variation of experiments already devised (as ordinary story-tellers re-tell the stories of others), or else a haphazard, blundering way of bringing phenomena together, to see what will happen. To invent is another process. The discoverer and the poet are inventors; and they are so because their mental vision detects the unapparent, unsuspected facts, almost as vividly as ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes

... invasion with a certain haphazard character at the outset, which boded no good to it ...
— Burgoyne's Invasion of 1777 - With an outline sketch of the American Invasion of Canada, 1775-76. • Samuel Adams Drake

... crews, and break the gun carriages. In the destruction of fort walls, shot was essential. After dismounting the enemy pieces, the siege guns moved close enough to batter down the walls. The procedure was not as haphazard as it sounds. Cannon were brought as close as possible to the target, and the gunner literally cut out a low section with gunfire so that the wall above tumbled down into the moat and made a ramp right up ...
— Artillery Through the Ages - A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America • Albert Manucy

... her appearance; for she was but about sixteen years of age, and uncommonly beautiful in form and feature. The only difficulty with the captain was, that he knew nothing of her malady, and that his medical science was of a most haphazard kind. After considering and cogitating for some time, as a man is apt to do when in a maze of vague ideas, he made a desperate dash at a remedy. By his directions, the girl was placed in a sort of rude vapor bath, much used by ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving

... creature, carefully preserved without my knowing it. It was written in a mood of impatient longing, due to my not finding you where I most surely expected to find you—in your room, on our sofa—in the haphazard words suggested by the pen you had ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... see from stern to mast. It lasted the whole of Sunday, the day after the departure, and did not lift till the following day, Monday, at eight o'clock in the morning. The little flotilla, which all this time had been sailing haphazard, had got among so many reefs that if the fog had lasted some minutes longer the galley would certainly have grounded on some rock, and would have perished like the vessel that had been seen engulfed on leaving port. But, thanks to the fog's clearing, the pilot recognised the Scottish coast, and, ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... work too perfectly to fit the haphazard facts of life. There was still the dead man to be explained. And a theory, however perfect, did not bring him any nearer to solving the personal problems concerned. What was one to do with a man who was at once sane and irresponsible? He could give up Clare like a man, he ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner

... large yard before it and a larger one behind, the tumble-down shed in which General Jackson had been tethered, a large barn, also rather tumble-down, with henhouses and corncribs beside it and attached to it in haphazard fashion. In the front yard were overgrown clusters of lilac and rose bushes and, behind the barn, was the stubble of a departed garden. Thankful looked at ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln

... together. Small groups formed haphazard squadrons, keeping each other company, but many ships were isolated and ploughed their way alone over the dreary sea. Many, despite hard work at the pumps, settled lower and lower in the water each day, and at last sank in the ocean, ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale

... only is found in the grave, generally placed apart on a brick, a heap of stones, or a layer of cut flints. The forearms and the hands were subjected to the same treatment as the head. In many cases no trace of them appears, in others they are deposited by the side of the skull or scattered about haphazard. Other mutilations are frequently met with; the ribs are divided and piled up behind the body, the limbs are disjointed or the body is entirely dismembered, and the fragments arranged upon the ground or enclosed together ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... Paul wrote about Religion "in a vivid and figured way"—not with the scientific and formal method of a theological treatise; and that, being a Jew, "he uses the Jewish Scriptures in a Jew's arbitrary and uncritical fashion"; quoting them at haphazard ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell

... rule can be given to distinguish wholesome plants from poisonous ones; but it has been observed that much the same thing suits the digestion of a bird that suits that of a man; and, therefore, that a traveller, who otherwise would make trials at haphazard, ought to examine the contents of those birds' crops that he may catch or shoot, to give a clue to his experiments. The rule has notable exceptions, but in the absence of any other guide it is a very ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton

... That state of the organism (note I do not say that STATE OF MIND) resulting from the vision is an emotion. We fly at once, we hide, and the action is in obedience to an instinct. But ordinarily we do not fly or hide haphazard; we think of ways and means, if only in a rudimentary fashion; we shape plans, perhaps as we fly; we pick up a stick on the run, hoping to escape but preparing for the reaction of fight if cornered. "What shall I do—what shall I do? finds no conscious answer if ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson

... haphazard plan born of desperation after Newman's arrest. Newman knew all about it. It had kept him occupied this past week; it was responsible in large measure for the mysterious happenings of the past ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer

... dull and effortless game of chess, yawning between the moves he generally made almost at haphazard, and with attention elsewhere engaged. About five o'clock came the sound of a distant ring, and Seaton jumped up, overturning the board, and so ending a game that else might have fatuously continued to this day. He effusively excused himself, ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors

... answered. "All the arts have their conventions." (Ruth was surprised at his use of the word. It was as if he had studied at the university himself, instead of being ill-equipped from browsing at haphazard through the books in the library.) "But even the conventions must be real. Trees, painted on flat cardboard and stuck up on each side of the stage, we accept as a forest. It is a real enough convention. But, on the ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London

... about it, darling. We won't have any more talk for the present about differing judgments, or of going away, or of anything uncomfortable"; and in this way, with nothing clearly understood, on a foundation indeed of misunderstanding, the decision was made, in the haphazard fashion which ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield

... his shoulders. "Pack of fools. Let them ask themselves a few questions. How did I get into this place? Remember what dear old Conrad said—WITH YOUR OWN PASSWORD, wasn't it? How did I get hold of that? You don't suppose I came up those steps haphazard and said the first thing that ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie

... is worse: "No one may lie by himself, but two by two in a dark room, or oftener three by three, in one bed, haphazard." One may well regret sweet France, "where each one has for his money what he chooses to ask for, and at reasonable price: room to himself, fire, sleep, repose, bed, white ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand

... father considered dead because he had taken service with the Iron Heel in the Mercenaries.* A member of the 'Frisco Reds pledged himself to twelve annual executions. The penalty for failure was death. A member who failed to complete his number committed suicide. These executions were not haphazard. This group of madmen met frequently and passed wholesale judgments upon offending members and servitors of the Oligarchy. The executions ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London

... upon the heavy ground, shoots beneath a wooden bridge which intercepts the light for a second like a wink, suddenly awakens all the slumbering echoes in the main street of a large town, and dashes on haphazard, pell-mell, neck-or-nothing, down the middle of the road. There - with mechanics working at their trades, and people leaning from their doors and windows, and boys flying kites and playing marbles, and men smoking, and women talking, and children crawling, and pigs burrowing, and unaccustomed horses ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens

... men under Quinnox stood their ground; a solid, defiant line that fired with telling accuracy into the struggling horde. On the walls two Gatling guns began to cackle their laugh of death. And still the mercenaries poured through the gap, forming in haphazard lines under the direction of the maddened ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... "accent" of their minds and tempers, it was a true part of their personal gesture, and was something they could not, and need not, do anything about, as if it were the normal tendency in them in their several ways. We all of us know that modern art is not haphazard, it is not hit or miss in its intention at least, certainly not the outcome of oddity, of whim, or of eccentricity, for these traits belong to the superficial and cultivated. We have found that with the best moderns there has been and is inherent in them the same sincerity ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley

... against the fence. Marigolds, alyssum, pansies, and border pinks flourished close to the ground, with sweet William, stock, mignonette, and velvet-brown wallflowers. Dr. Ben had planted all these himself, haphazard, and loved the resulting untidy jumble of bloom, with the lilac blossoms rustling overhead, birds nesting in his willow and pepper trees, and bees buzzing and blundering ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris

... haven't gone through life as circumspectly as you have. I drank; success made me dizzy. But I love Patty—God bless her!—as I never hoped or dreamed of loving any woman. You're a man, John; you will understand. I've been alone all my life; buffeted here and there, living haphazard, without any particular restraint on my desires. The dear old aunt was the only tie, and that was delicate till I came home and found how good and kind she was. I miss her; months from now I shall miss her a hundredfold. I'm very lonely. ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath

... and rode out the gale,—now blowing out of the north,—hanging to the tangle of spar and cordage which had once been the foremast and its gear. It made a fairly good sea-anchor, with the forestay—strong as any chain—for a cable, and she lay snug under the haphazard breakwater and benefited by the protection, as the seas must first break their heads over the wreckage before reaching her. The mainmast was far away, with all that pertained to it; but the solid, hard-pine jib-boom was still intact, and not one of the sixteen dories piled spoon-fashion in ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson

... the fact of Richard Calmady's infirmity and the hard-and-fast order of domestic procedure, the elaborate system of etiquette, which that infirmity had gradually produced. At Brockhurst there were no haphazard exits and entrances. These were either hopelessly official and public, or guarded to an equally hopeless point of secrecy. A contingent of tall, civil men-servants was always on duty. Richard was invariably in his place at table when ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... length he roused from his reverie, it was to discover that his haphazard course had taken him back toward the heart of Paris; and presently, weary with futile cruising and being in the neighbourhood of the Madeleine, he sought the cab-rank there, silenced his motor, and relapsed into morose ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance

... haphazard into her pocket, came forth with Hoy's epistle recently dispatched from Mousehole; and that she read, the accident saving her at least some moments ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts

... on the haphazard methods of pure chance. Nor, on the other hand, are its operations conducted in the rigid, mechanical method of a machine. Nor, again, can the result we see be due to the working of blind physical ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband

... observant student of the foregoing pages, that the successive enlargement of the structural designs of musical composition is achieved by a process of natural growth and progressive evolution. No single form intrudes itself in an arbitrary or haphazard manner; each design emerges naturally and inevitably out of the preceding, in response to the necessity of expansion, and conformably with the same constant laws of unity and variety,—the active agents, ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius

... evening, every table on the stretch of gravel before the little villa is occupied, and the good bourgeois, the little clerk taking his wife and mother-in-law out to dinner, are just as much in evidence, and more so, than the "smarter" classes of Parisians. The service is rather haphazard on a crowded night, and scurrying waiters appeal to the carvers in pathetic tones to wheel the moving tables on which the joints are kept hot up to their particular tables. The food is good, but not always served as hot as it should be—the ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard

... its most essential content. For it not only puts itself in the place of the unity of a system, but frequently also in the place of a harmonious and complete creed. Hence the rule of faith is necessary as a guiding principle, and even an imperfect one is better than a mere haphazard reliance upon the Bible.] ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack

... of modern civilization, to transport from France to Algeria thirty-seven thousand men aboard three squadrons, comprising six hundred and seventy-five ships of all sorts. Granted that in the eleventh century there was more haphazard than in the nineteenth, and that there was less care for human life on the eve of a war; still, without a doubt, the armament of Normandy in 1066 was not to be compared with that of France in 1830, and yet William's intention was to conquer England, whereas Charles X. thought only ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... any such community of hybrids will, superficially, appear to run somewhat haphazard. There will, of course, be no traceable difference between social or economic classes, in point of heredity,—as is visibly the case in Christendom. But variation—of an apparently haphazard description—will be large and ubiquitous among the individuals of such a populace. Indeed, it is ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen

... I said, and tried to think in vain if any motive but sheer haphazard could have guided Gordon-Nasmyth in the choice of these two men. I think perhaps Gordon-Nasmyth had the artistic temperament and wanted contrasts, and also that the captain helped him to express his ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... sentence, dropped at haphazard, the secret might never have been resolved. As it was, the clue—that the author of Devout and Sublime Thanksgivings was private chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgman—had only to be followed up; and it led to the name of Thomas Traherne. This information was obtained ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... binding before God. For such people marriages exist, but to us they are only hypocrisy and violence. We feel it, and, to clear ourselves, we preach free love; but, really, to preach free love is only a call backward to the promiscuity of the sexes (excuse me, he said to the lady), the haphazard sin of certain raskolniks. The old foundation is shattered; we must build a new one, but we must ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy

... when meeting others, or at outdoor sports—need not be formal, but can be done haphazard. This does not imply further acquaintance ...
— The Book of Good Manners • W. C. Green

... his spade haphazard into the earth and by that act liberate a small stream which shall become a mighty river. Not less casual perhaps, certainly not less momentous in its consequences, was the first attempt, by some ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne

... two-year-olds rising three, out of small cows, I have at Christmas got L40 from the butcher. Purity of blood in the male will be found highly to improve inferior races. A herd of breeding stock without the risk of haphazard will be secured at a moderate cost—one that will be ...
— Cattle and Cattle-breeders • William M'Combie

... kneeled the man with the knife. He did not raise his hand and strike a sudden, haphazard blow. Instead he placed the point carefully, though lightly, above the victim's heart, and then, suddenly, bore his weight upon ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... wealth, power; on a career which should at the same time dazzle the imagination and gratify her heart. Notwithstanding the gossip of Paris, founded on no authentic knowledge of her husband's character or information, based on the haphazard observations of the floating multitude, Lucretia herself had no reason to fear that her influence over Lord Monmouth, if exerted, was materially diminished. But satisfied that he had formed no other tie, with her ever ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli

... winds, and wears their colours. There is a heavenly game, on south-west wind days, when the clouds are bowled by a breeze from behind the evening. They are round and brilliant, and come leaping up from the horizon for hours. This is a frolic and haphazard sky. ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell

... edge of the camp he paused to take in its disposition. From one detail to another his eye wandered, and in it dawned a growing approval. Your native, left to his own devices, pitches his little tents haphazard here, there, and everywhere, according as his fancy turns to this or that bush, thicket, or clump of grass. Such a camp straggles abominably. But here was no such confusion. Back from the water-hole a hundred yards, atop a slight rise, ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al

... suggest that money spent in the purchase of new clubs which he strongly fancies, during his first few years of play, is seldom wasted. Many of the new acquisitions may be condemned after a very short trial; but occasionally it will happen that a veritable treasure is discovered in this haphazard manner. With all these possibilities in view, the beginner, knowing nothing of golf, and being as yet without a style to suit or any peculiar tastes that have to be gratified, should restrain himself from the desire to be fully equipped with a "complete ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon

... within, like a needle or an awl, seizes a loose hair or thread, and jerks it back through the wall and tightens it. It is a regular stitching or quilting process. The course of any particular thread or fiber is as irregular and haphazard as if it were the work of the wind or the waves. There is plan, but no conscious method of procedure. In fact, a bird's nest is a growth. It is not something builded as we build, in which judgment, design, forethought ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs

... spiritual hunger of the time was not fed. Its extravagance was not exposed to the solvent of laughter or to the flame of a sufficient indignation: they were therefore neither withered nor eradicated. For the spirit had grown old. The great movement of the spirit in Europe was repressed haphazard and, quite as much haphazard, encouraged, but there seemed no one corporate force present throughout Christendom which would persuade, encourage and command: even the Papacy, the core of our unity, was shaken by long division ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc

... "Well, that may perhaps describe it. I don't know; I have no plans. That's the charm of it. When one grows tired, that is the restful part of it—to simply start, having no plans; just to leave, and drift away haphazard. One is always bound ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers

... evident that some external basis is necessary in the progressive development of such phenomena, and that the teacher, who is to respond to the requests of the child in conscious evolution, cannot do so adequately by haphazard means; he must be guided by conditions previously determined by experience. In other words, those external means already alluded to several times, that staircase, the steps of which lead the soul upwards, must have been already established by experience, ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori

... far from being a perfunctory, haphazard affair. Everything had been thought out and planned beforehand. The servants sat in a circle with eager, expectant faces. In front of them was a circle of dogs. The dogs' presents were not much of a novelty. A new collar for one, a new basket for another, ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan

... one of these haphazard chaps Who sit in cafes drinking; A most improper taste, perhaps, Yet pleasant, to my thinking. For, oh, I hate discord and strife; I'm sadly, weakly human; And I do think the best of life Is ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service

... gardeners have treatises on irrigation. Have mothers or nurses any similar guides? Such books are unknown to modern civilization. Infants, boys and girls, and adults are brought up haphazard, and their garden of life becomes choked with weeds. The drought soon makes itself felt, and a little graveyard mound is their usual fate. Before some of us wither and fade, to what a pest-weed is our adipose changed for want ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison

... a solution of the whole vexed question of master and man, and to be a seed-sowing which is bound to be followed by an abundant and most humanizing harvest. Ever since I began to study, even in a haphazard way, the social system under which we sweat and groan, I've wanted in on a job like yours. I still want in. Will you take me as a silent partner, Raymer? I'm not making it a condition, mind you: come here any time after ten o'clock to-morrow, and you'll find the money waiting for you. But I do ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde

... Einstein were already secret allies and the Don Juans of a coterie of haphazard Sixth Avenue beauties. There was a usefulness to both in the new alliance, and Einstein was already the destined secret patron of ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage

... Nor are the lessons haphazard dashes at the nearest living thing; on the contrary, they are virtually fundamental, whether with respect to their relation to some of the classified sciences, or with reference to the development of thought and power of expression in ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 15, February 18, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various

... for Miss Peacock, the servants, and those remaining in the boarding-house over the holidays. First she went through the carols. Then she sang the favorite song or songs of every one present, including several of Miss Pritchard's. And though the programme was haphazard it wasn't motley—only simple and old-fashioned and full of sweetness and melody. The girl must have been dull indeed not to have guessed something of the exquisite and genuine ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray

... be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it. A well constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at haphazard, but ...
— Poetics • Aristotle

... anyone who would get a fair idea of the prison policy of the period. It is, of course, inevitable that the criticism conveyed in a strong imaginative work should fail to give a full view of results so complex as those produced by the largely haphazard method ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne

... Law through any act of this honest, open-faced, intelligent young gentleman, long known among them as an upright and fair-dealing man. The Law, just and exact, would now protect this prisoner. The Law was no matter of haphazard. The prosecution must show that some specific article of the Law had ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough

... the honour of my country and of my profession as a journalist were at stake. Therefore, I made my horse, who was not at all unwilling, keep well alongside the President. Under such conditions steering was impossible; and we galloped along at haphazard. I was consoled to feel that if the President's horse could pick his way, mine could probably do the same. As it happened nobody's horse made a blunder, and we all four emerged quite safely from the ordeal and soon turned homeward, but by a different way. Our pace, however, ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... fiercely cherished independence, and when the Union sent embassies to invite them into the common effort, they rejected them. And when we suggested that in the interests of racial safety they abandon their haphazard colonization efforts that resulted in an uncontrolled series of jumps into the dark, punctuated by minor wars and clashes when colonists from separate origins landed, more or less simultaneously, ...
— A Question of Courage • Jesse Franklin Bone

... probably for several generations running, of Waganda mothers. This amused Kamrasi greatly, and induced me to inquire how his purity of blood was maintained—"Was the king of Unyoro chosen, as in Uganda, haphazard by the chief men—or did the eldest son sit by succession on the throne?" The reply was, "The brothers fought for it, and the best man ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke

... difficulty, she cleared the skerm face at a single bound, and bearing poor Jim-Jim with her vanished into the darkness beyond, in the direction of the bathing-place that I have already described. We jumped up perfectly mad with horror and fear, and rushed wildly after her, firing shots at haphazard on the chance that she would be frightened by them into dropping her prey, but nothing could we see, and nothing could we hear. The lioness had vanished into the darkness, taking Jim-Jim with her, and to attempt to follow her till daylight ...
— A Tale of Three Lions • H. Rider Haggard

... diaphragm thickness that gives a maximum telephonic result. Such result, which is analogous to those that occur in other electro-magnetic phenomena, may explain the want of success of many tentatives made somewhat at haphazard, with a view to increasing the intensity ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various

... be hard, sir, if this was the end of everything, and it was all haphazard, as it were; so hard that no sensible man could see it without going clean off his head altogether. But when you rightly understand as it's all the Master's doing, and that He knows what He's about a sight better than we could teach Him, it makes a wonderful ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler

... certain directions. To introduce chance into the world is to introduce chaos. No more would the waters of the interiors of the continents find their way to the sea, were there not a slant in that direction, than could haphazard variation, though checked and controlled by natural selection, result in the production of the race of man. This view may be only the outcome of our inevitable anthropomorphism which we cannot escape from, no matter how deep we dive or ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs

... eastern coast, and then behind the mountain of Selloum, and as far as the first sands of the desert. They sought for a place of refuge, no matter where. Utica and Hippo-Zarytus alone had not betrayed them; but Hamilcar was encompassing these two towns. Then they went northwards at haphazard without even knowing the various routes. Their many miseries ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert

... The only data on which the police could proceed were soon exhausted. The trunk left by the mysterious stranger, whose name was certainly not Rochdale, was opened. It was full of things bought haphazard, like the trunk itself, from a bric-a-brac seller who was found, but who gave a totally different description of the purchaser from that which had been obtained from the concierge of the Imperial Hotel. The latter declared that Rochdale was a dark, sunburnt ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne



Words linked to "Haphazard" :   haphazardness, careless, haphazardly, slipshod, random



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