Word: scatteringly
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Superstitious, nervous spinsters bank on the old adage that lightning never strikes twice in the same place. Superstitious, nervy gamblers bank on the chance that bad luck will also scatter its bolts. Last week both lightning and luck struck with tragic redundance...
...widow Thomas is an extremely loquacious, scatter-brained person, who, is develops, is meant to be irresistibly attractive in a plump, helpless, middle-aged way. Her charm is unfortunately obscured, with the result that a perfectly honest suitor, a sinister looking Italian who deals in rugs, is mistaken in the first act by most of the audience for a crafty villain with some base design to his wooing. He subsequently appears, however, for no worse end than to supply the impoverished family with some sorely needed cash at the opportune moment. This change of face is not intended...
...correct acts and thus aided their learning, and that "annoyers" retarded their learning, his contemporaries were skeptical. But many years later Thorndike confirmed his theory of the effect of rewards on learning with what he regards as his most remarkable and conclusive experiment. This was the "spread and scatter" phenomenon. Students who answered a series of nonsense questions not only remembered best the answer that was rewarded with the word "right'' but also remembered the answers just preceding and following that answer better than those more distant in time. The experiment proved that reward had far more effect...
They are no more frequent in colleges than in institutions, hotels, and restaurants that serve food to large numbers of people. They are more striking, however, because in the college, all cases come to the attention of the authorities, whereas restaurant and hotel guests scatter and seldom report their illness...
...entertain the reader; the painter, to amuse, to shock, to entertain the galleryite: both in-tend to jar your emotions. A fiction writer, to stir your guts, will split any infinitive that gets in the way. A painter, for the same reason, may draw his horizon line perpendicular, and scatter vanishing points like confetti...