Word: shiftlessly
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...bourgeois smugness. His story is told by Victor, the boy he says he won at backgammon, or maybe chess -- the tale shifts with the passing years. Along with the wraithlike woman who is the Captain's unlikely grand passion, Victor is the chief beneficiary of a shifty, sometimes shiftless man's redeeming devotion. He is also, in the end, the Captain's unwitting Judas. Greene, 84, wastes not a word in distilling the fictional preoccupations of a lifetime, omitting descriptive padding and elaborate transitions. But stripped down, the narrative runs fast and true across that bleak and poignant emotional landscape...
...charming con man named Arch Persons, a bad-check artist who worked, when he worked, as a promoter for a carnival performer called the Great Pasha, whose specialty was being buried alive. His mother was a small-town Alabama beauty named Lillie Mae Faulk, who eventually chucked the shiftless Arch, headed for New York City and changed her name to Nina because it sounded more sophisticated. Little Truman was parked for much of his childhood in a Southern-gothic household of eccentric cousins in Monroeville, Ala. But Clarke stresses that his most agonizing early memory was of being locked...
Problem is, several thousand other shiftless men have the same idea, and almost as soon as Mickey and Bobby wake up in the morning, they discover that one of them has gotten the boot. In a gesture of amyl-nitrate reinforced friendship, both gentlemen quit, sealing their bonds of brotherhood and looming poverty...
...department that relies on CUE evaluations is a "very lazy, shiftless department." Ozment says, urging that senior professors take the time to observe their younger colleagues' teaching firsthand...
...rancor. So the family patriarch determined to take the bottle to the end of the world and drop it off. On his journey he saw the strangest things: beasts with round legs (Jeeps), and a female with strange skins on her back (the village schoolteacher), and a squad of shiftless African guerrillas. The gods must be crazy...