Word: inept
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last Saturday at the Phi Beta Kappa meeting Mr. Paul Shorey tried modern culture and found it dull. Americans are sexually inept, poets are crude, intellectually the country is dead. As a solace from this tedious period Mr. Shorey looked not to a refreshing dawn in the future, but preferred to gaze longingly at the roseate sunset of a halycon past. Lowell, Longfellow, Holmes, and Emerson are the foundations of American culture the men to whom their countrymen must point with pride...
...certain sense been neglected. Politicians are frequently heard to mouth its more quotable passages. They use it as an authority upon world peace, upon farm relief, upon harbor legislation. And William J. Bryan won a presidential nomination by a Biblical simile as astounding as it was inept. But the Bible was not written as a political tool, nor yet as a grammar. It was a monument erected out of the sincerity of men's hearts to one of the greatest institutions mankind has known. It should be studied in the full realization of that sincerity and with high appreciation...
...Lockport, N. Y. Forthwith they took Thurber's fingerprints. The prints indicated a Bertillon record which showed that the man had been in California, Ohio and New York prisons for forgeries most of the time he claimed he was in the Far East. As a forger he was inept. As a missionary he was fluky. But where did he get his worms? That remained Cleveland's puzzle...
Mingled in the newsroom conversation were impulses of self-preservation and sentiment, also anger at Old Joe's inept sons who had not given their employes any warning, any chance to take the papers over and keep them running. Someone suggested that the employes band together now-surely the money could be found to save the Worlds from extinction and, worse, from chain journalism. The staff rallied swiftly. Like the foreword of doom on the preceding day, the call swept through the building, dispelling for the time the depression that hung there, bringing enthusiastic response from all departments. Executives...
...naval warfare shown here will have a strong suspicion that Director John Ford has romanticized. All the action is highly theatrical: a jumble of spywork, gunfire, carousal, submarine heroism, with some brilliant photography of sea-scenes. The photography is all that recommends it, for the dialog is inept and the story of the Mystery Ship sent out as decoy for a German submarine and the beautiful German spy who loves a U. S. officer but sees him kill her brother in the course of duty, gets laughs in the wrong places. There is no one of note in the cast...