Word: offhands
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Thimbleful. In Palm Beach, Fla., charged with drunken driving, Caddy Donald Jackson was fined $100 despite his offhand denials: "All I had to drink was five shots of whisky and eight bottles of beer...
...before we did," he advises, "sit at their feet . . . ask them to pray with you and for you; give thanks to God that they are not only your flock but also your shepherds . . . Their name is legion, and they come from all classes and walks of life. Offhand, I can think of a Philadelphia lawyer, a school carpenter, a dining-room steward, a housewife, a paper hanger, a commercial traveler, a middle-aged widow, a surgeon and a schoolteacher who are of their number...
...Chinese Nationalist navy, and her machine-gunners opened fire. Nigelock's crew leaped for cover, but before the gunboat could close, a 4.5-in. shell whistled across her bow. H.M.S. Cockade had come racing to the rescue. The Nationalist gunboat, "suitably rebuked," as Cockade's offhand report put it, turned tail...
...cross-reference questioning, so that a subject who tias lied at the beginning of the interview will expose himself near the end. Beyond this, he has reinterviewed hundreds of subjects after lapses of two to ten years and they have told substantially the same story; this rules out carefree, offhand lying. However, Kinsey has found that males who have not gone beyond grade school are less reliable informants than the more highly educated, and probably they have exaggerated their juvenile conquests. Similarly, he concedes, women are likely to cover up, so that some of their indiscretions before or after marriage...
...Offhand, this novel has what seems a pretty used-up plot, the story of a tarnished Cinderella. Senorita Amparo Emperador was very beautiful, very poor, and an orphan, without beaux or hope of dowry. In Madrid, in 1867, that was about as bad a fix as a girl could find herself in. So Amparo had become a slavey for her distant, stingy relatives, Rosalia and Francisco Bringas, who kept her jumping from dawn to dusk and repaid her with spoiled food and a few rare pesetas...