Word: hapless
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...lifted all strictures against arms sales to Iran or its enemy Iraq. Insisting that Gretl's shipment was legal and should be delivered to Iran, the Lisbon government refused to let Gretl's crew dump its high-explosive cargo back on Portuguese docks. Ever since, the ship and its hapless crew have been condemned to their Iberian shuttle, at a cost of roughly $10,000 a day, while the West German shipper, the Danish charterer and the governments involved try to untangle the mess...
...statuesque white-tailed buck grazes along a roadside in rural Virginia. Passing hunters slow their cars, aim their high-powered rifles out the window and fire -- then fire again when the deer neither falls nor flees. Three police cruisers suddenly surround the cars, and the hapless hunters discover they are the targets of a sting dubbed Bambiscam...
...rest of the cast has a tougher time of it. It is not always that they are untalented; individually they no doubt can hold their own with the best. But when asked to play a crowd scene as a group of battle-weary marines, these hapless undergrads come closer to innocents abroad. They exude the same kind of pseudo-confidence with which teen-age virgin boys discuss...
...junior high schools across the country this question--and kindred statements such as, "For all I know you don't exist"--have long provoked upperclassmen to perform wedgies upon hapless would-be philosophers. Yet the issue refuses to be dismissed with the onset of puberty...
More and more consumers are beginning to feel almost as frustrated as Harry Hapless. Personal service has become a maddeningly rare commodity in the American marketplace. Flight attendants, salesclerks and bank tellers all seem to have become too scarce and too busy to give consumers much attention. Many other service workers are underpaid, untrained and unmotivated for their jobs, to the chagrin of customers who look to them for help. The concept of personal service is a difficult quantity to measure precisely, to be sure; the U.S. Government keeps no Courtesy Index or Helpfulness Indicator among its economic statistics...