Word: fecklessness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Rods & Greenhorns. The boat boom has brought really only one great menace-the hot-rodder, inboard and outboard, whose feckless abandon yearly kills and maims scores of other boatmen and bathers. New federal and state laws are now tightening requirements on registration and demanding strict adherence to traffic rules. Better still is the growing organization of Coast Guard Auxiliary and Power Squadrons, which give free instruction in seamanship, successfully instill a sense of pride in new boat owners...
Before justice of a sort catches up with the feckless Oliver, he either seduces or proves irresistible to: 1) his father's gardener's daughter, 2) a blowzy barmaid, 3) a golddigger, 4) a bohemian nymphomaniac, 5) his elder brother's fiancée. Oliver may be just a crazy mixed-up cad to the reader, but in a fatuously psychiatrical reconciliation scene, Oliver's father shoulders the blame: "I think perhaps you represented to me the little daughter I never had and always longed for." A Sunnylands Granger would have the answer to that...
...stories collected in this book by Anthologist Kapp cover the years from 1934 to 1956, and many of them, particularly those written after Stalin's death, reflect an impatience with Communist society that is apt to surprise U.S. readers. In Yury Nagibin's The Night Guest, a feckless sponger is held in contempt by two zealous Soviet citizens, but not before one of them reflects sadly on the ''warmth and gaiety" that the wastrel brings into people's lives. Loaf Sugar, by Konstantin Paustovsky, features an overbearing Soviet Organization Man whose mere presence "filled...
Their secret seems to be that no strain -from highly organized Betty's husband and two children to highly disorganized Adolph's feckless bachelorhood-has flawed a 20-year collaboration. "If I weren't stuck with her as my partner," Adolph once wrote in tribute to Betty, "I could be off on my own and free to starve to death-or worse yet, free to bore myself to death...
...befriends Montgomery Pew, a feckless but amiable young Jumble who holds a job with a government welfare bureau. Montgomery pries Johnny loose from the hardhanded white law, while Johnny returns the favor by showing his pal safe trails through the Spade jungle. The pair meet such notable Spades as Peter Pay Paul, who pushes an asthma cure as marijuana; Billy Whispers, a pimp of stature; and Ronson Lighter, whose kleptomania focuses on only one Jumble artifact...