"Slipshod" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a thorough education," was the answer, "whether or not you ultimately become a writer. This education is indispensable for whatever career you select, and it must not be slipshod or sketchy. You should ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... slipshod, evasive, hypocritical work? Can you afford to shirk, or make-believe or practise pretense in any act of life? No, no; for all the time you are molding yourself into a deformity, and drifting away from the Divine. What the world does and says about you is ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... correctly and vigorously. We are apt in England to class as an "Americanism" every unfamiliar, or too familiar, locution which we do not happen to like. As a matter of fact, there is a pretty lively interchange between the two countries of slipshod and vulgar "journalese;" and as the picturesque reporter is a greater power in America than he is with us, we perhaps import more than we export of this particular commodity. But there can be no rational doubt, I think, that the English language has gained, and is gaining, enormously ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... before anybody came. When at last they did he heard them coming for a long time before the door was opened, heard slipshod steps on shiny linoleum, and a husky ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... consisted principally in his wonderful capacity to labor for perfection in the most minute detail. And yet most ambitious misfits are unwilling to work hard. Their products always show lack of finish due to slipshod methods, unwillingness to spend time, to take pains to bring what they do up to a standard of beautiful perfection, so far as perfection is humanly possible. Those who are mentally lazy do not belong in an artistic vocation. ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... intelligently given, and their relative importance is well estimated. Throughout, the paper is admirably proportioned and well edited, the paragraphs being much more carefully written than in any London paper except the Times. There is rarely a slipshod sentence to be found in any part of the paper, which is the more remarkable as slipshod writing is a noticeable characteristic of almost every other colonial paper. The leading articles are for the most part supplied by contributors not on the permanent staff, two university ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... some of them in another way. When you have selected a topic, you should first of all think it through. In doing this, arrange your ideas as consistently and logically as you can, and test them with your reason. Then set them forth in language which shall be lucid and exact. Tolerate no slipshod diction, no vaguely rendered general meanings. Send every sentence, every word like a skilful drop-kick—straight above the crossbar. When you have done your best with the topic, lay it by for a space. Time ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... sideboards to sniff at the milk in the bowls, each protected by a plate, while he purrs his morning greeting to the world. A moment later the widow shows her face; she is tricked out in a net cap attached to a false front set on awry, and shuffles into the room in her slipshod fashion. She is an oldish woman, with a bloated countenance, and a nose like a parrot's beak set in the middle of it; her fat little hands (she is as sleek as a church rat) and her shapeless, slouching figure are in keeping with the room that reeks of misfortune, ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... be cited, viz., the violin concerto (Op. 61) of Beethoven, which was first played by Clement, December 23, 1806. This concerto bears evidence of having been written in a hurry. Clement played it at sight without rehearsal, and, as a consequence of its being brought forward in such a slipshod manner, it was very seldom heard until its revival by Joachim. The MS. shows that the solo part was the object of much thought and alteration by the composer, but evidently ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... only begets others."[237] If there are theoretic economists who still hold that "a demand for commodities is not a demand for labour," they may be reminded that a paradox is not necessarily true. In fact, this particular paradox is seen to be sustained by a combination of slipshod reasoning and moral prejudice. The growing opinion of economic students is veering round to register in theory the firm empirical judgment from which the business world has never swerved, that a high rate of consumption is the surest guarantee of progressive trade. ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... a slut and a slattern; yet it staggered him when it first dawned on him that, in the awful deterioration of Granville and the Baby, the standard of her own toilette had gradually lowered. Then gradually he got inured to it. The tousled, tumbling hair, the slipshod feet, the soiled blouse gaping at the back, were, he reflected bitterly, in perfect harmony with Granville, and of a piece with everything. He had ceased to censure them; they belonged so inalienably to the drab monotone; they were so indissolubly a part of all his life. And somehow she bloomed in ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... Haigh and I were in the way of finding ourselves in no slight difficulties. The Briton in his own insular ports is a very slipshod person with regard to the papers of small craft—especially pleasure craft. He looks upon those last with a favourable eye, and watches their going and coming with small concern. The peoples of the Mediterranean are constructed in different fashion. At the larger ports they are suspicious; ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... their laurels without an attempt to diminish them, and my father and brother were too much in earnest in their objects to lose time. In half an hour, four post-horses to each britchska whirled them off;—my father, to take the northern road, some hints of Gretna having transpired in the slipshod secrecy of the servants' hall—my brother, to pursue on the Dover road, conjecturing, with more sagacity than I had given him credit for, that as the fox runs round to his earth, the Frenchman always speeds ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... the darkness. What struck him as peculiar about the steps was that there seemed no particular desire to move stealthily. There was no extreme caution. They moved along in rather a slipshod way and sounded like soft slippers or feet in stockings. There was something clumsy, irresponsible, almost reckless about ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... I used to think so, but I'm beginning to have my doubts about it. One comforts the whole world in a slipshod, sketchy kind of way; but one could ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... seen him conducting Lady Sitwell in to dinner, or had heard him talking to her with quaint yet graceful gallantry, you would have inferred that the earlier period of his life had been passed in more stately society than could be found in Shepperton, and that his slipshod chat and homely manners were but like weather-stains on a fine old block of marble, allowing you still to see here and there the fineness of the grain, and the delicacy of the original tint. But in his later years these ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... accommodating "the milky mother" with the food which she should have received two hours sooner, a slipshod wench peeped into the stable, and perceiving that a stranger was employed in discharging the task which she, at length, and reluctantly, had quitted her slumbers ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... bits of iron and brass went rattling out of sight, like spectres' chains; the hook-nosed antiquary drew in his cracked old show-case; the greasy frier of fish and artichokes extinguished his little charcoal fire of coals; the slipshod darning-women, half-blind with six days' work, folded the half-patched coats and trousers, and took their rickety old ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... achieve a concentrated unity of aesthetic impression. They are all diffuse; they seem to be content to lead a hundred indecisive attacks upon reality at once rather than to persevere and carry a single one to a final issue; they are all multiple, careless, and slipshod—and they are ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... in earnest about writing—no slipshod or want of connection. Writing requires boundless leisure, and is an infinite labour, yet there is also a very great pleasure in it. I shall be delighted to read ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... a stream some distance off, and then had breakfast. Then general parade. There must be some two or three hundred of us, and a wretched, slipshod lot we looked. A voice said, "Those who want to rejoin their regiments, two paces to the front." A few accepted the invitation. I gave in my name, and was told to parade again at two, with kit packed. The next moment we were being split up into fatigue parties. Fatigues ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... and lacked energy. Shuddering at the sight, Ellen refused to conjecture. All too soon she would learn what had happened, and all too soon, perhaps, she herself would be in the midst of another fight. She watched the men. They were making a hurried slipshod job of packing food supplies from both cabins. More than once she caught Colter's gray gleam of gaze on her, and she ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... this muddle and confusion and slipshod thinking there arose one man with a purpose, one man who fixed his eyes on a single inevitable goal and walked straight at it, not minding what or whom he trod upon on the way. His purpose was the mass-production ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... and broad-shouldered, with a keen and handsome, rather florid, face, a firm mouth, and penetrating steel-blue eyes. He was careful of his appearance, too, and from his well-cut clothes and his well-trimmed brown hair, beard, and whiskers, it was easy to see that there was nothing of the slipshod about this ambitious young emissary ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... bland, trashy, lukewarm, cold, frigid, poor, dull, dry, languid; colorless, enervated; proposing, prosy, prosaic; unvaried, monotonous, weak, washy, wishy-washy; sketchy, slight. careless, slovenly, loose, lax (negligent) 460; slipshod, slipslop[obs3]; inexact; puerile, childish; flatulent; rambling ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... of Camden's work did not give Philemon Holland much opportunity for spreading the wings of his style. Anxious to present Camden fairly, the translator is curiously uneven in manner, now stately, now slipshod, weaving melodious sentences, but forgetting to tie them up with a verb. He is commonly too busy with hard facts to be a Euphuist. But here is a pretty and ingenious passage about Cambridge, unusually ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... for it, if I may. She'll have written it on a bit of this block and with this pencil. It's been thrown down in a hurry. Miss Damaris is that tidy, she can put her hand on anything she wants in the dark, which is more than most of the slipshod, take-off-your-dress-and-leave-it-there young ladies of the ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... The slipshod systems pursued at these institutions have been severely criticised by scientific educators, but they seem to answer the purpose for which they are intended. It is often asserted that the colleges and universities in India do ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... Nether-Barnim no doubt gets its share: but what is this to such ruin as there is? A mere preliminary drop, instead of the bucket and buckets we need!—Busching, a dull, though solid accurate kind of man, heavy-footed, and yet always in a hurry, always slipshod, has nothing of dramatic here; far from it; but the facts themselves fall naturally into ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... superiors in the civil government have more often to rebuke undue leniency. How much more hard when, instead of an evil-doer, one had only to deal with a good-tempered, kindly ignoramus, or one perhaps who drew near the border-line of slipshod adequacy; and especially when to do so was to initiate action, apparently invidious, and probably useless, as in cases I have cited. It was easier for a captain or first lieutenant to nurse such a one along through a cruise, and then ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... the thundering tone of unspoke speeches, Or like a lobster clad in logic breeches, Or like the gray fur of a crimson cat, Or like the mooncalf in a slipshod hat; E'en such is he who never was begotten Until his children were ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... that singular home. The wasteful and useless extravagance, the want of plates, the profusion of old tapestry in holes, of antique and ungilt lustres, the draughty doors, the constant visits of creditors, the slatternly appearance of the young ladies in slipshod slippers and dressing gowns, put to flight the best intentioned. In truth, it is not everyone who could resign himself to hang up the hammock of an idle woman in his home for ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... Tall, powerfully built, black-bearded, and abrupt, he gave an impression of volcanic force, and at the same time of great keenness. A scientist of remarkable discernment, he possessed with all his broad views a marvelous capacity for detail, and Colin soon learned that the somewhat slipshod methods of a college laboratory would not ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... to any but those who love Plain-dealing.' So she comes before us. A graceful, comely woman,[53] merry and buxom, with brown hair and bright eyes, candid, sincere, a brilliant conversationalist in days when conversation was no mere slipshod gabble of slang but cut and thrust of poignant epigram and repartee; warm-hearted, perhaps too warm-hearted, and ready to lend a helping hand even to the most undeserving, a quality which gathered all Grub Street round her door. At a period when any and every writer, mean or great, of whatsoever ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... lamps: unless you feed them with oil, they too go out from old age. Again, the body is apt to get gross from exercise; but the intellect becomes nimbler by exercising itself. For what Caecilius means by "old dotards of the comic stage" are the credulous, the forgetful, and the slipshod. These are faults that do not attach to old age as such, but to a sluggish, spiritless, and sleepy old age. Young men are more frequently wanton and dissolute than old men; but yet, as it is not all young men that are so, but the bad set among them, ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... language is a thing to be desired? All your common bughouse phrases make the shrinking highbrow tired. There is nothing more delightful than a pure and careful speech, and the man who weighs his phrases always stacks up as a peach, while the guy who shoots his larynx in a careless slipshod way looms up as a selling plater, people brand him for a jay. In my youth my father soaked me if I entered his shebang handing out a line of language that he recognized as slang. He would take me to ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... regular German—rather stout, with brown hair tumbled all over his head, a bushy beard, good nose, the kindest eyes I ever saw, and a splendid big voice that does one's ears good, after our sharp or slipshod American gabble. His clothes were rusty, his hands were large, and he hadn't a really handsome feature in his face, except his beautiful teeth, yet I liked him, for he had a fine head, his linen was very nice, and he looked like a gentleman, though two buttons were ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... Slipshod; follow me." And he led the way to an inner room, in the middle of which stood a table, covered ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... slipshod? no one must walk slipshod with me. Why, Rosamond," said he, looking at her shoes with disgust, "I thought that you were always neat; no, I cannot take you ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... cupboard and took out a bottle of brandy three-parts full. Randal snatched at it eagerly, and put his lips to the mouth of the bottle. "Ah," said he, after a short pause, "this comforts; now give me food." Oliver hastened himself to serve his brother; in fact, he felt ashamed that even the slipshod maid-servant should see his visitor. When he returned with such provisions as he could extract from the larder, Randal was seated by the fire, spreading over the embers emaciated bony hands, like the ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... formerly the feet (the metrical feet) of the Caoinan were much attended to; but on the decline of the Irish bards these feet were gradually neglected, and the Caoinan fell into a sort of slipshod metre amongst women. Each province had different Caoinans, or at least different imitations of the original. There was the Munster cry, the Ulster cry, etc. It became an extempore performance, and every set of keepers varied the melody ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth
... is that in which, by a slipshod extension, it is allowed to have also the other sense of possible, and that of probable. This is described by the highest authority as "hardly a justifiable sense etymologically, and ... recognized by no dictionary". ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... one day, "I don't wan' to hear you talk in that slipshod way any longer before Flaxen. You know better; you've had more chance than I have—be'n to school more. They ain't no excuse for you, not an ioty. Now, I'm goin' to say to her, 'Never mind how I talk, but ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... Congressional claimants, who come here session after session, and too often grow old and destitute while unsuccessfully prosecuting before Congress a claim which is just, but in some respects irregular. These ruined suitors, threadbare and slipshod, begging or borrowing their daily bread, recall Charles Dickens' portraiture of the Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce Chancery suite, which had become so complicated that no one alive knew what it meant. The French spoilation claims that were being vigorously prosecuted in 1827 are yet undetermined in ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... in which aspiration for real literature might have played an ampler part. For the literature of the past Page had great respect, but his interest was ever in the present and the future. He was forever fulminating against bad writing, and hated the ignorant and slipshod work of the hack almost as much as he despised the sham of the man who affected letters, the dabbler and the poetaster. His taste was for the roast beef of literature, not for the side dishes and the trimmings, and his appreciation of the substantial work of ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... story; but I give it without the pleasant style of Mr. Straus's telling. There are many very happily touched scenes; more especially had I a guilty sympathy roused by one in which poor John endeavours to concentrate his very slipshod brains upon an afternoon of hard reading. And almost all the characters are alive, from the entertaining old lady who keeps the village post-office to Mrs. Adderson, the naughty novelist in whose hands ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 6, 1914 • Various
... rapidity. It was the old, though rare, story. Alike in his theatre design and his tender landscape, beauty of spirit flowed in everything he did into beauty of execution. He was a man in whose presence everything mean or slipshod withered. ...
— The Beggar's Opera - to which is prefixed the Musick to each Song • John Gay
... our curious gaze. Here, too, we saw boys, apparently eight or ten years of age, playing in the streets with no other clothing than a shirt reaching to the knees, and women peddlers of mineral water dressed in ragged red blouses and blue skirts, who, with disordered hair and stockingless, slipshod feet, shuffled by pushing hand-carts filled ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... long before that the verses in question are to be rejected) no doubt perceived that this would be the most convenient way of disposing of the evidence for and against: but one is at a loss to understand how English scholars can have acquiesced in such a slipshod statement for well nigh a hundred years. A very little study of the subject would have shewn them that Griesbach derived the first eleven of his references from Wetstein,(194) the last fourteen from Birch.(195) As for Scholz, he unsuspiciously adopted Griesbach's fatal enumeration of Codices; ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... it is to stimulate one's general interest in a subject before advising him to read a book that is not itself calculated to arouse and sustain that interest. Possibly the modern newspaper habit, with its encouragement of slipshod reading, may play its part in producing the general result, and doubtless a careful detailed investigation would reveal still other partial causes, but the chief and determining cause must be lack of interest. And it is to be feared that ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... food to keep them from constantly deserting. The damp, mouldy, dingy cellar-kitchen, the cold, windy, desolate attic, devoid of any comfort, where the domestics are doomed to pass their whole time, are witnesses to what such families consider economy. Economy in the view of some is undisguised slipshod slovenliness in the home-circle for the sake of fine clothes to be shown abroad; it is undisguised hard selfishness to servants and dependents, counting their every approach to comfort a needless ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... understand my feelings and past life, so there will be no congeniality, and I shall have to work practically alone. Perhaps in time I shall become coarse and common like the rest," she said with a half-shudder at the thought of old-fashioned garb, slipshod dressing, and long monotonous hours at one employment. All these were inseparable in her mind from ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... committed in a spasm of popular fury, is to render a service to the Republic. But for the courts to arrogate to themselves functions which properly belong to the legislative bodies is all wrong, and in the end works mischief. The people should not be permitted to pardon evil and slipshod legislation on the theory that the court will set it right; they should be taught that the right way to get rid of a bad law is to have the legislature repeal it, and not to have the courts by ingenious hair-splitting nullify it. A law may be unwise and improper; but it should ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... the lurid light of a dirty-looking battered old oil-lamp, which left the corners of the dingy wainscoted room in profound obscurity. He looked up from his papers with some show of surprise on hearing Mr. Fenton's name announced by the slipshod maid-of-all-work who had admitted the late visitor, Mr. Medler's solitary clerk having departed to his ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... occasionally see a variety of apple grafted on another in which the graft part gives the tree a sort of slipshod appearance. How about the bearing in that ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Second Annual Meeting - Ithaca, New York, December 14 and 15, 1911 • Northern Nut Growers Association
... is the attempt to enforce such contracts which gives the foreign merchant his poor opinion of Japanese commercial honesty. In time, when the Japanese have learned that they must abide by written contracts, these complaints will be heard no longer. The present slipshod methods are due to faulty business customs, the outgrowth of the old Samurai contempt for trade in ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... some stretched out on the benches and others leaning on the tables with their elbows, some were barefoot others were wearing their shoes slipshod like slippers; almost all were dirty and poorly clad; their clothes were unbuttoned, their hair uncombed, and their faces frightful; they wore pistols in their belts, and sabers, with scarves turned into shoulder-straps. Bottles, bits of bread, fragments of meat and bones lay ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... be done in slipshod, haphazard manner. The system's need for radioactives cannot ...
— Medal of Honor • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... watched, I noticed a certain slowness—a heaviness in all his movements—together with a listless, slipshod air which, I judged, was very foreign to him; moreover, as he worked, I thought he hung his head lower ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... to tell you—'n' me here for the best part o' a good half-hour already. Well, 'n' my cousin! She come out o' a letter, Mrs. Lathrop, a old torn letter 's you or any other ordinary person would probably 'a' throwed away without even readin'. But I was never one to do things slipshod, 'n' I read every scrap 's I 've got time to piece together, so it was nothin' but natural 's I sh'd quit work 's soon 's I see Cousin Marion's letter 'n' sit right down to read it. 'N' it's good as I did too, for 'f I 'd been careless 'n' burned my rubbish ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop • Anne Warner
... conception of the functions and the obligations of the writer who addresses the public, in however ephemeral a form, on topics of social importance. No article of his ever showed a trace either of slipshod writing or of make-believe and perfunctory thinking. To compose between four and five hundred pages like these, on a variety of grave subjects, all needing to be carefully prepared and systematically thought out, was no inconsiderable ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... brief space of time within which they were carried out, the majority of these works betray no signs of haste or slipshod execution; the craftsmen employed on them seem to have preserved in their full integrity all the artistic traditions of earlier times, and were capable of producing masterpieces which will bear comparison with those of the golden age. The Eastern gate, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... first chapter, an aerial for receiving does not have to be nearly as well made or put up as one for sending. But this does not mean that you can slipshod the construction and installation of it, for however simple it is, the job must be done right and in this case it is as easy to ...
— The Radio Amateur's Hand Book • A. Frederick Collins
... The faults of Cooper—his stilted style and slipshod English, his tedious moralizing, his artificial dialogue, his stuffed gentlemen and inane "females," his blunders in woodcraft—all these are so easily discovered by a casual reader that the historian need not linger over them. His virtues are more interesting, ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... world-novelist you need an all-embracing humanity as well, such as we find in Tolstoy's War and Peace—but that great book, need one say, came of no slipshod speed of improvisation. On the contrary, Tolstoy corrected and recorrected it so often that his wife, who acted as his amanuensis, is said to have copied the whole enormous manuscript no less than ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... plump breast; her colorless hair (both her own and the switch) rolled and rose high above her head; her round cheeks were unchanging pink, her light eyes steady; the surprised lift of those flaxen eyelashes had made many a man ashamed of his emotions and his slipshod grammar together. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... are not strictly grammatical. In this fashionable whim could be discerned a survival of the habits of the times of Alexander. The exquisites of those days, on the rare occasions when they spoke their own language, made use of such slipshod forms; as much as to say, 'We, of course, are born Russians, at the same time we are great swells, who are at liberty to neglect the rules of scholars'); 'I am tryin' to prove by that, sir, that without the sense of personal ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... So also he will shun the grossness that employs the epithet "quaint" to put upon subtlety and the devices of a studied workmanship an imputation of eccentricity; or, if he falls in with the populace in this regard, he will be careful to justify his innuendo. The slipshod use of "nice" to connote any sort of pleasurable emotion he will take care, in his writings at least, utterly to abhor. From the daintiness of elegance to the arrogant disgust of folly the word carries meanings numerous and diverse enough; it must not be cruelly burdened with all the laudatory ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... cannot be justified by strict rules of syntax, e.g. "hi qui pueros in ludum mittunt, idem barbatos ... non docebimus?" [19] "When we send our children to school to learn to speak correctly, shall we not also correct bearded men, when they make mistakes?" Slipshod constructions like this occur throughout the treatise on the Latin tongue, though, it is true, they are almost entirely absent from that on husbandry, which is a much more finished work. Obscurity in explaining what the ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... the boy like a rat, but the alertness faded instantly from his eye, and his lip slackened into a slipshod smile. "Why, yes, sonny, me and my grub-stake. You've been to school, I'll bet, but they didn't learn yu' Chinook, now, did they? Chinook's the lingo us white folks trade in with the Siwashes, and we kinder falls into it, talking ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... and the working-men had not yet turned out; at the morning coffee-rooms the shutters were just being taken down; warmly- clad tram-men were tramping through the streets in their wooden-soled boots; slipshod, tired women ran stumbling along to their early jobs, shivering with cold and weary of life, weary before they had begun their day. Here and there a belated woman toiled along the street carrying a clothes-basket, a mother taking her baby to the creche before ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... moment war was inevitable. As the details of the struggle do not concern us, it will be enough to state here that the Defenders now, in slipshod fashion, began to take a variety of measures to maintain the Protestant cause. They formed a national Board of Thirty Directors. They assessed new taxes to maintain the war, but never took the trouble to collect them. They relied more on outside help than on their own united action. They deposed ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... Manning's little push for power was nothing new or shocking in Terran frontier politics. With the rapid expansion of the Edge through the centuries, the frontier policy of the Confederation had had to adapt itself to comparatively slipshod methods of setting up governments in the newly-opened areas. Back in the early days they'd tried sending out trained men from each Cluster headquarters, but that had been foredoomed to failure: travel between the ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr
... pot-belly and short legs. He puffed and panted when he walked, and after two minutes in his company Cyril Maude would have played him to perfection. The staff-work of his army was as good in detail as any machinery of war may be, and the tactical direction of the Second Army battles was not slipshod nor haphazard, as so many others, but prepared with minute attention to detail and after thoughtful planning of the general scheme. The battle of Wytschaete and Messines was a model in organization and method, and worked in its frightful destructiveness like the ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... Mannering appeared, and found a tall strong countryman, clad in a coat of pepper-and-salt coloured mixture, with huge metal buttons, a glazed hat and boots, and a large horsewhip beneath his arm, in colloquy with a slipshod damsel—I, who had in one hand the lock of the door, and in the other a pail of whiting, or camstane, as it is called, mixed with water—a circumstance which indicates Saturday ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... looked somewhat surprised, but answered in the affirmative, and a slipshod girl ushered him into a long back room, filled with boxes for the accommodation of parties, in one of which he took his seat. In a more miserably forlorn place he could not have found himself: the room smelt ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... Ermengarde heard the slap, and then heard Becky run in her slipshod shoes up the stairs and into her attic. They heard her door shut, and knew that she threw herself upon ...
— A Little Princess • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... word 'preposterous'. It is now no longer of any practical service at all in the language, being merely an ungraceful and slipshod synonym for absurd. But restore and confine it to its old use; let it designate that one peculiar branch of absurdity which it designated once, namely the reversing of the true order of things, the putting of the last first, and, by consequence, of the first last, and of what excellent ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... is beset by Reichsfolk. "Wunsch, with the Cavalry, he at least may thread his way out, under cloud of night, by the opposite or Daun side," calculates Finck. And Wunsch sets out accordingly: a very questionable, winding, subterranean march; difficult in the extreme,—the wearied SLIPshod horses going at a snail's pace; and, in the difficult passes, needing to be dragged through with bridle and even to be left altogether:—in which, withal, it will prove of no use for Wunsch to succeed! Finck's Generals endeavoring to rank and rearrange through the night, find that their very cartridges ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... perhaps equally great advantage of assigning a daily task as against ordinary piece work lies in the fact that the success of a good workman or the failure of a poor one is thereby daily and prominently called to the attention of the management. Many a poor workman might be willing to go along in a slipshod way under ordinary piece work, careless as to whether he fell off a little in his output or not. Very few of them, however, would be willing to record a daily failure to accomplish their task even if they were allowed ...
— Shop Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor
... the first year did not hold out, none the less he issued from that severe course of study a changed man, one who knew the difference between the learned lawyer and the unlearned. His own methods, to be sure, remained what they always continued to be, unsystematic, not to say slipshod. Even after he became president his lack of system was at times the despair of his secretaries.(6) Herndon, who succeeded Logan as his partner, and who admired both men, has a broad hint that Logan ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... matter with 'em, Mrs. Gaylor?" Nick asked. He spoke carelessly, in the matter of accent as well as of his feeling about the clothes. He cut off his words in a slipshod way, as if he had never had time to think much about the value or beauty of the English language. Still, though his speech was not that of a cultivated man, it did not grate on the ear. His voice was singularly pleasant, even sweet, ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... A pair of slipshod feet shuffled, hastily, across the bare floor of the room, as this interrogatory was put; and there issued, from a door on the right hand; first, a feeble candle: and next, the form of the same individual who has been heretofore described as labouring under the infirmity of speaking through his nose, ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... disturbed by vagaries, or gusts of temper. Well, Bill was happy—but one day he was devilish unhappy, because Sall had lost one of her shoes, which wasn't to be wondered at, considering as how she was always slipshod. 'Who has seen my wife's shoe?' says he. 'Hang your wife's shoe,' said one, 'it warn't worth casting an eye upon;' Still he cried out, 'Who has seen my wife's shoe?' 'I seed it,' says another. 'Where?' says Bill. 'I seed it down at heel,' says the fellow. But Bill still hallooed out about his wife's ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... played less feverishly, but there was nothing slipshod about her performance. The chubby songster found time to proffer brief explanations in asides. "They want the patriotic stuff. It used to be all that Hawaiian dope, and Wild Irish Rose stuff, and songs about wanting to go back to every place from Dixie to Duluth. But now seems it's all ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... nobler and more sensible than that! Even his earliest poetry has in it no false, slipshod sentiment. Its subject is nature and heroic incident, and is indeed a faithful attempt to carry out the aim so well stated above. Some have doubted whether Bayard Taylor really had the power which he says ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... play, With bony and unkerchief'd neck defies The rude inclemency of wintry skies, And sails with lappet-head and mincing airs Daily at clink of hell, to morning prayers. To thrift and parsimony much inclined, She yet allows herself that boy behind; The shivering urchin, bending as he goes, With slipshod heels, and dew-drop at his nose, His predecessor's coat advanced to wear, Which future pages are yet doom'd to share, Carries her Bible tuck'd beneath his arm, And hides his hands to keep his ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... think that he would have promptly resented any undue familiarity. He was a man of the most exact habits, painfully conscientious in all his dealings, and absolutely devoid of vices, unless, indeed, his extravagance in the purchase of old furniture might be classed under that head. To people of slipshod habits, his painstaking exactness was of course highly exasperating, and I often myself felt that he was in need of a redeeming vice. If I could have induced him to smoke, take snuff, or indulge in a little innocent gambling, I believe it would have ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... with alacrity. Marian put off her bonnet and furs, and sat down before the fire to despond over the prospect of living in that shabby room, waited on by that slipshod Irish girl, who roused in her something very like racial antipathy. Presently Eliza returned, carrying a small tray, upon which she had crowded a lighted kerosene lamp, a china tea service, a rolled-up table cloth, a supply of bread and butter, and a copper kettle. When ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... the real reason we demand the right of entry. We are exhausting the soil of the South by our slipshod farming on great plantations where we use old-fashioned tools and slave labor. We refuse to study history. Ancient empires tried this system and died. The Carthagenians developed it to perfection and fell before the Romans. The Romans borrowed it from Carthage. It destroyed the small farms and ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... Revolution. There should have been the black outline of a guillotine against that heavy red and white of the morning. Dr. Bull was in his white shirt and black breeches only; his cropped, dark head might well have just come out of its wig; he might have been Marat or a more slipshod Robespierre. ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... gyp comes slipshod in, To wake his master ere the bells begin. The College, in ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... of the art you seek to practise, you can at least take time and deliberation before dishonoring it. Disabuse yourself especially of the belief that any grace or flow of style can come from writing rapidly. Haste can make you slipshod, but it can never make you graceful. With what dismay one reads of the wonderful fellows in fashionable novels, who can easily dash off a brilliant essay in a single night! When I think how slowly my poor thoughts come in, how tardily they connect themselves, what a delicious prolonged ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... or underfeeding of the system. Neurasthenia is the "fatigue neurosis," as a leading expert terms it. It may be due to any morbid condition under heaven. It is "that blessed word Mesopotamia" of the slipshod diagnostician. Nearly one-fourth of the cases which come into our sanatoria for tuberculosis have been diagnosed and treated for months and even years as "neurasthenia." It satisfies the patient—and it means nothing; though some experts contend for ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... discrimination. Shakespeare had a finer conception of form, but even he was contented to take all his ancient history from North's translation of Plutarch and dramatise his subject without further inquiry. Jonson was a scholar and a classical antiquarian. He reprobated this slipshod amateurishness, and wrote his "Sejanus" like a scholar, reading Tacitus, Suetonius, and other authorities, to be certain of his facts, his setting, and his atmosphere, and somewhat pedantically noting his authorities in the margin when ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... they should know, but which at present remains hidden from them, than any other instructor; and, incidentally, they would learn to know good English when they see or hear it—perhaps even to discriminate between slipshod copiousness and true eloquence, and that alone would be a ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... in the primary stage does not follow any rule of thumb, and is as much an affair for expert judgment as a strictly engineering or legal problem. In the great majority of cases a correct decision of the matter can be reached in the primary stage by careful study and examination, but not by any slipshod or guesswork means. To secure the benefit of modern methods for the early recognition of syphilis those who expose themselves, or are exposed knowingly, to the risk of getting the disease by any of ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... duties and waited uneasily, wondering why their chiefs did not set them to work. In truth the making of peace was to be characterized by a looseness of organization, a failure to cooerdinate, and a waste of time and energy resulting from slipshod methods. In the deliberations of the Conference there was a curious mixture of efficiency and ineffectiveness; a wealth of information upon the topics under discussion and an inability to concentrate that information. Important decisions were ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... from Britain—though we had never spoken to him and he, perhaps, had barely heard our names—we always wrote our best for Stevenson. To him each writer amongst us—small or more than small—had been proud to have carried his best. That best might be poor enough. So long as it was not slipshod, Stevenson could forgive. While he lived, he moved men to put their utmost even into writings that quite certainly would never meet his eye. Surely another age will wonder over this curiosity of letters—that for five years ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... history the absence of an influence is sometimes as significant as the presence of it. The looseness of Wergeland's style, its frothy abundance, its digressions and parentheses, its slipshod violence, would be to Ibsen so many beacons of warning, to be viewed with horror and alarm. A poem of three stanzas, "To the Poets of Norway," only recently printed, dates from his early months in ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... busy scene, and went into an obscure part of the town, where Scrooge had never penetrated before, although he recognised its situation and its bad repute. The ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched; the people half naked, drunken, slipshod, ugly. Alleys and archways, like so many cesspools, disgorged their offences of smell, and dirt, and life upon the straggling streets; and the whole quarter reeked with crime, with filth ...
— A Christmas Carol • Charles Dickens
... romantic Helen Bladen had eloped, though the intermediate years of sorrow and misfortune had changed that dapper young beau into a careless, hopeless pessimist. What the end might have been but for Peggy is hard to guess, but the past two years had made him think and think hard too. Though still slipshod of speech as the result of associating with his humbler neighbors, he was certainly making good, and few lapses occurred as he shook hands with Nelly's friends and then went out to help them mount. In his dark gray suit, Alpine hat and his gray gloves, something ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... metre, leaden pun, For slipshod rhyme, and lazy word, Have pity on this graceless one— Thy mercy on ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... your Hands and wonder Why Such slipshod Work the Magazines will buy, Don't grumble at the Editor, for he Must serve the Public, e'en ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne • Gelett Burgess
... out of the door with slipshod shoes. Under the pretence of admiring the flowers, he glanced, now towards the east; now towards the west. But upon raising his head, he descried, in the southwest corner, some one or other leaning ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... Bartlemy, "I don't regret your goose and cabbage!" and having said this, he ran away as hard as he could, dropping one of his slipshod shoes as he went along, with his master pursuing after, yard stick in hand, whom, however, he ...
— Funny Big Socks - Being the Fifth Book of the Series • Sarah L. Barrow
... situation. I see in him personified the rising generation of literary critics, who have a hard row to hoe in a deliterated democracy. By some unknowable miracle of birth or training he has come by a love of beauty, a reverence for what is fine and true, an absolute intolerance of the slipshod and insincere. ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... in the parlor a tramp happened to pass the brightly lighted shop. He was weather-beaten and slipshod, and altogether made a most disreputable appearance. A hand was thrust into each of his pockets, and these pockets were destitute of coin. The tramp was hungry and penniless. The little shop with its gay light and tempting articles of stationery, and books and sealing-wax displayed ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... of terrific homesickness swept over her. But what was it she wanted, she asked herself, in place of this gay kaleidoscope of light and color and ceaseless confusion? Not the stagnation of the Bartlett household, certainly not the slipshod poverty of the Martels. She searched ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... written always—loses in force and poignancy of main design. Our little air is swamped and dwarfed among hardly relevant orchestration; our little passionate story drowns in a deep sea of descriptive eloquence or slipshod talk. ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the table, and descried a small slipshod girl in a dirty coarse apron and bib, which left nothing of her visible but her face and feet. She might as well have been dressed in ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... others only the powerful stimulus which the Revolution gave to all bold and progressive thought. The vitality of her ideas sprang from her own experience. She had received rather less than was customary of the slipshod superficial education permitted to girls of the middle classes in her day. With this nearly useless equipment, she had found herself compelled to struggle with the world not merely to gain a living, but to rescue a ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... has a very accurate mind. He can't bear anything slipshod in the way of a statement. Now, you are sure, after your walk, you do not feel the fire too much? Then move into this chair. You have really taken the least comfortable in the ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... him one of your white shirts. He wore a cheap horrid cotton thing, and I knew it would look ridiculous. And then his shoes were so slipshod, I let him have a pair of yours, the old ones with the ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... missionary, I was led through a number of rooms and courts to see Chung- wang privately. I was brought into one of his private sitting-rooms, where he sat clothed loosely in white silk, with a red kerchief round his head, and a jewel in front. He was seated in an easy chair, and fanned by a pretty slipshod girl. He asked me to a seat beside him and questioned me about a map he had seen with parallel lines running each way, said to have been made by foreigners, asked me to explain what it was. He also showed me a musical-box and a spy-glass, ...
— General Gordon - Saint and Soldier • J. Wardle
... anything else properly," answered Morris impatiently, "and no one can tell from a cursory examination whether or not there are other injuries, to say nothing of the danger from septicaemia if the work is done in a clumsy, slipshod manner." ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... a methodical mind, a rather intolerant disposition, thick glasses, a very cold and precise manner, extreme personal neatness, and abysmal ignorance of the West. He disapproved of California John's rather slipshod dress, to start with; his ingrained reticence shrank from Davidson's informal cordiality; his orderly mind recoiled with horror from the jumble of the Supervisor's accounts and reports. As he knew nothing whatever of the Sierras, he was quite unable ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... his plans, and without a word of remonstrance, he obeyed. The whole interior was dingy and dirty. Mrs. Tucker was not a neat woman, and everything looked neglected and slipshod. ...
— The Young Musician - or, Fighting His Way • Horatio Alger
... by dint of much brain racking and real hard labour contrived to give some slight sketch of his life and an appreciation of his genius. She was painfully conscious, however, that the result was poor, the style slipshod, and the general composition lacking both in unity and finish. She pulled a long face as she signed ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... as I have described, who has the passion for authorship, and who fails in the due combination of gifts, must face the possibility of being regarded as a worse than useless being; as unpractical, childish, slipshod, silly, worth no one's attention. He is happy, however, if he can find a solace in his own work, and if he is sustained by a hopefulness that makes light of results, if he finds pleasure in the mere doing of ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... equally well be served by pretending that I had done so. Ah, but I knew that I had to deal with clever people—with artists in crime—and it behooved me to be an artist also. I had good reason to know that their system of espionage was efficient; and the slipshod way ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... the pros and cons. I have some doubt about the seventh letter, which, read by the light of George Sand's letter, ought perhaps to be placed after the ninth. But the seventh letter is somewhat of a puzzle. Puzzles, owing to his confused statements and slipshod style, are, however, not a rare thing in Chopin's correspondence. The passage in the above-mentioned letter of George Sand runs thus: "Pauline leaves me on the 16th [of August]; Maurice goes on the 17th to fetch his sister, who should be ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... tightly to her heart, as if to still its beating, and went tremulously to the door; thence to the stairs, to anticipate the lumbering step of the slipshod maidservent. ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... played in every polite tongue, in every civilized land. This was Robert Macaire in L'Auberge des Adrets. It is no exaggeration to say that Lemaitre created this part, though this verb is used in our day in very slipshod fashion. Robert Macaire was the creation of Lemaitre, and not of the authors of the play. At the rehearsals he repeatedly declared that the part was "impossible," and that the public would never receive it as the authors had written ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... chapter from the Arabian Nights; write out the dramatis personae, taking care that you have plenty of supernaturals, genii, elves, gnomes, ghouls, or vampires, to make up a competent corps de ballet; work out your dialogue in slipshod verse, with as much slang repartee as you possibly can cram in, and let every couplet contain either a pun or some innuendo upon the passing events of the day. This in London is considered as the highest species of wit, and seldom fails to bring down three distinct rounds of applause from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... Allen home every detail of housekeeping was complete and very carefully looked after, while at the Barlows' everything went along in a slipshod, hit-or-miss fashion. ...
— Patty's Summer Days • Carolyn Wells
... friends. But soon his native good-sense seems to have perceived that the whole thing was only a fevered dream of a diseased age." Now the reviewer, if he knows anything of the doctrines in question, is entitled to express his opinion of them, even if he does it in tautological and slipshod English. But he has no right to attribute his own opinions to M. Sainte-Beuve, who is so far from holding them that, in articles written so lately as in 1861 (Nouveaux Lundis, I.), he has not only traced the enduring influence of Saint-Simonianism ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... lips to heel!" said Phillotson; but so faintly that in closing the door she did not hear it. The dread of a reactionary change in the schoolmaster's sentiments, coupled, perhaps, with a faint shamefacedness at letting even him know what a slipshod lack of thoroughness, from a man's point of view, characterized her transferred allegiance, prevented her telling him of her, thus far, incomplete relations with Jude; and Phillotson lay writhing like a man in hell as he pictured ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... in our own time—that Turkey irretrievably Asiatic in spirit under a semi-European system of administration, which has governed despotically in the interests of one creed and one class, with slipshod, makeshift methods, but has always governed, and little by little has extended its range. Knowing its imperfections and its weakness, we have watched with amazement its hand feeling forward none the less towards one remote ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... the mind a better example than his verse is to be found in his letters. A number remain. They might seem to be written by two different men! Half a dozen are models of that language he adored—they cost him, to our knowledge, many days—the rest are slipshod notes that any man might write, for he thought they would not survive, and, indeed, the majority of his editors have had the piety ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... Adj. feeble, bald, tame, meager, jejune, vapid, bland, trashy, lukewarm, cold, frigid, poor, dull, dry, languid; colorless, enervated; proposing, prosy, prosaic; unvaried, monotonous, weak, washy, wishy- washy; sketchy, slight. careless, slovenly, loose, lax (negligent) 460; slipshod, slipslop^; inexact; puerile, childish; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... her slipshod shoes into the house. The countess then addressed her son, who, leaning back in a corner of the carriage, sat with his head ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... prisa (with all speed). a la espanola (in the Spanish fashion). a troche y moche, a trochimoche (in a slipshod way). con blandura (gently). de mala gana (unwillingly). de vez (or de cuando) en cuando (from time to time). tal cual vez (once in a while). un si es, no ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano
... of slipshod alteration or careless retention contrast quite unfavorably with the attitude of the translator in the preface to parts VII and VIII, in which he confesses to the creeping in of errors in consequence of the perplexities of the ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... English person should write a novel, and make a farmer in it talk like Mr. Trowbridge, everyone who read the book would say he was impossible. His way of speaking was a little slipshod, sometimes (though not a bit more than ours when we drop our "g's" and things like that, only more guileless sounding); but without seeming a bit as if he wanted to show off what he knew—which is so boring—he quoted Shakespeare, and Wordsworth, ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... industrial corporations. He may even have appeared to be over-insistent upon business accuracy, system, and efficiency, so anxious was he to belie the popular notion that Negroes must of necessity, because they are Negroes, be slipshod and unsystematic. In refutation of this familiar accusation he built up an institution almost as large as Harvard University which runs like clockwork without a single white man or woman having any part in its actual administration. ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... without training will usually stand with his head protruding forward, his shoulders drooping, his body twisted, and his feet far apart, with all his weight on one leg. Such an attitude is enough to condemn one even before he begins to speak. A slipshod appearance suggests slipshod thinking and reasoning. A speaker should always stand erect, with his head back, chin in, shoulders rolled back and down; either the feet should be near together with the weight of the body on both, or one foot should be slightly in advance ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... "to plant a million. The sky would then no longer be brass, or the face of the country a quarry." Thanks to his researches, Burton has made his name historical in the Holy Land, for his book Unexplored Syria—written though it be in a distressingly slipshod style—throws, from almost every page, interesting light on the Bible. "Study of the Holy Land," he said, "has the force of a fifth Gospel, not only because it completes and harmonises, but also because it makes intelligible ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... incendiarism was standing in front of the image, crossing herself and bowing, and repeating the same words over and over again. The deacon's daughter sat on the bedstead, looking before her, with a dull, sleepy face. Khoroshavka was twisting her black, oily, coarse hair round her fingers. The sound of slipshod feet was heard in the passage, and the door opened to let in two convicts, dressed in jackets and grey trousers that did not reach to their ankles. With serious, cross faces they lifted the stinking tub and carried it out of the cell. The women went out to the taps ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... such thing as atheism," Ont insisted. "I merely said that the reasoning used by the ancients to arrive at the Creator was the most slipshod and illogical possible. There was another line used long ago that was more solid, but still very weak. It started out with the statement, 'I can be aware of nothing but thoughts.' External stimuli, if such there are, must be transformed into thought before I can be aware of them. Since I can ...
— The Unthinking Destroyer • Roger Phillips
... when one finds in his books inaccuracies, conceits, and hasty generalizations, one is apt to grow impatient with him. But there are points which connect him with the modern English scholar. In the first place, he was a very hard and systematic student. He had none of the slipshod methods of many men of his type. He had respect for the most recent investigations in his special line of work, — he knew the value of scholarship. The Peabody Library enabled him to have at hand ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... have accepted an unsworn statement from the prisoner; but the coroner always administered oaths when prisoners were willing to take them. The repetition of that jargon with a profane conclusion (for so it seemed, in the slipshod way that it was said), which the coroner called an oath, was a positive pleasure to that official. As Marcus desired to take the oath, the coroner rattled off the unintelligible something, and handed him a Bible, which the prisoner pressed reverentially ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... the general recommendation of doing everything you do as it ought to be done. There should be no slipshod way of writing a letter by which you ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... the thing. It was a great mistake when they were abandoned. Then everyone knew where they were. If there was a mistake in the pleading then the whole case was thrown out of court. That was as it should be. Men had to be good and careful lawyers in those days. The slipshod methods of ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... himself of the best talent in France. The case of his nephew was the reverse of this. His highest quality was his tenacity of purpose, and his disposition was inclined to kindly tolerance, even of pecuniary greed and slipshod service. He could rouse himself to great exertion; but in the later days of Imperialism, pain and his decaying physical powers had rendered him inert; moreover, in his general habits he had always been indolent and pleasure-loving. In carrying out the coup ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... very dubious. In one case is a possible margin of four days, another (wrongly numbered by the way) does not occur at all among the twenty-six. In the third, Herr Parish is wrong in his statement.[4] This is a lovely example of the sceptical slipshod, and, accompanied by the miscitation of the second case, shows that inexactitude is not all on the side of the seers. However the case is not very good, the two percipients fancying that the date ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... common fields was a different matter. Though on them the traditional rotation of crops was stupid and the husbandry slipshod, yet the semi-communal tillage of the three open strips enabled Hodge to jog along in the easy ways dear to him. In such cases a change to more costly methods involves hardship to the poor, who cannot, or will not, adopt the requirements ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... back were a lot of dilapidated sheds, leaning in all directions. A mob of sheep was penned in a yard outside one of the sheds; and in the garden an old woman, white-haired and wrinkled, with a very short dress showing a lot of dirty stocking and slipshod elastic-sided boot, was bending over a ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... splendor of his dream but in the bare reality of dreary fact. And, in spite of it all, if fancy had stripped the woman of her livery of misery, it would have spoilt her for him; for he wanted her, he longed for her, he loved her—with her muddy stockings, her slipshod feet, her straw bonnet! He wanted her in the very house where he had seen ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... has not scaled; no problem of the world over which he is not fruitfully toiling. Moreover, his thoroughness is the envy of the students of all other countries, and his hatred of sham scholarship and slipshod ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... accustomed to the general dowdiness which in this respect prevails in England. Most of the English girls seem to have no idea that their feet should be dressed. The Viennese lady is very tasteful. She is neither slipshod nor gaudy. I never beheld more dainty toilettes. Everything about them, as a sailor would say, is cut "by ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... Tucker at left tackle, Graham at center, Cowan at right-guard, Foster at quarter, and Devoe at right end, played well with the glaring exception of Cowan, whose work in the second half especially was so slipshod that Mills, with wrath in his eye, took him out and put in Bell, a second ...
— Behind the Line • Ralph Henry Barbour
... messages becomes impossible; but no experience can prove that when the instrument is destroyed, the soul which used it for purposes of communication and self-manifestation ceases to be, and only slipshod logic would draw such an inference. In discussing the Divine Personality, we already quoted Mill, a far more careful reasoner than Haeckel, who laid it down that while experience furnished us with no example of any series of states of consciousness without a material ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... and occasionally there loomed through the dull vapour, the heavy outline of some hackney coach wending homewards, which, drawing slowly nearer, rolled jangling by, scattering the thin crust of frost from its whitened roof, and soon was lost again in the cloud. At intervals were heard the tread of slipshod feet, and the chilly cry of the poor sweep as he crept, shivering, to his early toil; the heavy footfall of the official watcher of the night, pacing slowly up and down and cursing the tardy hours that still intervened between him and sleep; the rambling of ponderous carts and ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... oats with late and slipshod sowing had been around fifteen bushels to the acre. Some fields of spring wheat had run fifteen bushels. And potatoes had fairly cracked the ground open. One settler, an experienced potato grower, had four acres that yielded 300 bushels. ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... "members for India" with a vigour and acumen which deprived them of speech. The East, he said, had had its revenge upon the West by making certain Englishmen babus. His honourable friends had the same slipshod minds, and they talked the same pigeon-English, as the patriots of Bengal. Then his mood changed, and he delivered a solemn warning against what he called "the treason begotten of restless vanity and proved incompetence." ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... journalist before the days of newspapers, produced an enormous amount of work in various literary forms; in the drama he claimed to have had 'an entire hand, or at least a maine finger' in no less than two hundred and twenty plays. Inevitably, therefore, he is careless and slipshod, but some of his portrayals of sturdy English men and women and of romantic adventure (as in 'The Fair Maid of the West') are of refreshing naturalness and breeziness. Thomas Middleton, also a very prolific writer, often deals, like Jonson ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher |
