Word: feckless
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...police response to the mob was often feckless but occasionally ferocious. As the disorders spread, Superintendent Orlando Wilson built his force from 200 men the first night to 900 the third. The mobs generally retained the initiative as police dashed confusedly back and forth over the battleground to meet each new challenge. At times, the cops displayed admirable coolness in the face of vile curses and the bruising missiles of street warfare; at others, they matched the rioters in reckless violence with club and gun. Once, after losing a sniper in the dark, a squad of infuriated cops turned...
Enter Dr. Johnson. It is the talent of a great interviewer, but it functioned only feebly in Boswell's interviews with his father, who threatened continually to disinherit his feckless son. "Better to snuff out a candle," he snarled, "than leave it to stink in a socket." In London later that year, the talent was further tried by a man who hated Scots and sycophants and saw both in Boswell. "Mr. Johnson," Boswell gasped as he sat gaping at the Grand Cham of English letters, "I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it." Fixing Boswell with...
Throughout the South, Democratic organizations that have grown fat and feckless on one-party power are being rattled by Republican challenge. The G.O.P. threat to Georgia's statehouse is proving so formidable that Democratic Senator Herman Talmadge, regarded as unbeatable in his state, announced last week that he would run for another term as Governor "if the people of Georgia desire...
...Ears. Pairing Jean-Paul Belmondo and Ursula Andress in a feckless adaptation of Jules Verne's The Tribulations of a Chinese Gentleman, Director Philippe de Broca overbids to repeat the success of his hilarious mock-action thriller, That Man from Rio. The trouble is that Director de Broca's imitation of his own winning formula is not a whit better than anyone else's, and a good deal worse than some...
...imprisonment. "He wanted to go to jail," A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany noted with a wry jab, "and I wouldn't do anything to take away from his happiness." At week's end Quill was released from Bellevue Hospital and entered a private hospital, a sad and feckless parody of the youth who fought in the Irish rebellion. Worse still, he demonstrated for all to see the sad internal state of his union (no strike benefits, modest treasury) and showed how unconcerned its members were for the lives and welfare of some 8,000,000 New Yorkers...