Word: hapless
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...elevator operators and the shop sweepers. That morning the boss made his own tea in the office, and the white housewife lugged her own parcels to the car after a round of shopping. For 95% of Johannesburg's Africans sat obstinately at home, mourning for the 68 hapless blacks cut down by the withering hail of police bullets in the Sharpeville massacre a week earlier...
Last week poor, simple-minded Nina was in prison awaiting sentence for what the weekly Oggi could only describe as "the most senseless crime in Sicily's history." Once too often the hapless Salvatore had passed by the Giurlando farmhouse, and Nina had fired four fatal bullets into his body. "Do you repent of what you have done?" she was asked by the authorities. "Why should I repent?" she cried. "I was dishonored." The medical examination that declared her still a virgin meant nothing to Nina. Monotonously, tonelessly, she kept repeating: "He kissed me. He kissed me. He kissed...
...Hapless Precedent. Bemused, its barricades bristling with aphorisms, Oxford lost to Cambridge in rugby, badminton and lacrosse. In the press, antiquarians wryly recalled the dark days of 1907, when Lord Curzon, former Viceroy of India, defeated Lord Rosebery, former Prime Minister, by going to such extremes as dragging the Ambassador to Belgium all the way across the Channel to vote. Others recalled that former Prime Minister Lord Oxford and Asquith, who lost to a relatively unknown opponent, had taken his defeat hard in 1925. In order to find a precedent for a Prime Minister's seeking the job while...
Osorio did eventually make it, but not before the crowd had twisted his thumb so enthusiastically that he could not play the next day against Cuba. Worse yet for Panama fans, Lopez announced that he was too sick to take the field. After Lopez' hapless sub had made two errors, orange husks began to swirl out of the stands like snow. Hundreds of spectators jammed around the dugout as desperate umpires begged Lopez to play so that the game could go on. Lopez finally acceded to the wishes of his public, but he went none for four as Cuba...
...General Eleazar López Contreras, toured the nation with thundering demands that López make way for a democratic election. Enraged, López Contreras in 1937 drove Betancourt and his followers underground, launched a hunt for him. Once government officials took an ear bitten from the head of a hapless gardener by a cop during a street fight, pickled it and displayed it as "Betancourt's ear"-as though they were capturing him piece by piece. Betancourt's daughter Virginia recalls that in those years, "Daddy was always in hiding, and we never had lunch at home." Then...