Word: ineptness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Persimmons in Sparta. As Massachusetts' 55th governor, Christian Herter joins a variegated pantheon of men who have occupied the handsome old Bulfinch statehouse. The first governor was John Hancock, a vain and arrogant aristocrat who was as popular as he was inept, won nine terms in office. Poor, plain Sam Adams tried and failed to turn the Commonwealth into a "Christian Sparta." The election of David I. Walsh marked the rising tide of immigration: he was the first Irish Catholic to win the governorship. Persimmon-faced Cal Coolidge reversed the trend, turned back to Yankee conservatism. In three terms...
Last week, belatedly making up for an inept job of explaining its case to the world, the U.S. State Department issued a statement showing just what the U.S. considers the issue of principle to be. "Members of the free world," said State, "have affirmed that there can be no force used to compel the unwilling prisoners to return to the Communists . . ." Sir Winston Churchill agrees with this principle, but he insists that the Chinese have also recognized it by agreeing to turn over unwilling prisoners to neutral custody. If, while under neutral custody, the Communists cannot "eliminate their apprehensions" about...
...suppose that various Yearbook writers felt the need of jazzing up the copy a little, and, being inept, ended up with specimens whose low taste they were unable to perceive. Though I am not a member of any of these groups, I think this is quite deplorable. --Mark Jacobs...
...Knobloch is a veteran but inept burglar, with a record of four arrests and three convictions. He had finished one stretch in an East Berlin jail and was headed for a trial that might bring him another when he was visited by a top East German secret police bureaucrat known to him only as "Paul." Paul had a bargain to offer. If Knobloch would agree to help kidnap Dr. Walter Linse, the No. 2 man in the anti-Communist Investigating Committee of Free Jurists, he himself would be set free; if he refused, Knobloch would find himself in jail...
Before he got the job, Perkins never thought much about being a Housemaster. Born 52 years ago this month at Westwood, Mass., into a family of distinctly proper Bostonians, he prepped at Milton Academy, graduating in 1918. He then spent a year on a ranch (developing into an incredibly inept cowboy, he says) before entering Harvard with the Class of 1923. He captained the third 150-pound crew in College history during his senior year and got his degree cum laude in History and Literature. He enrolled in the Law School, but found law so little to his liking that...