Word: shiftlessness
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...move the family to Constantinople, where there is less danger, Stavros has already resolved to quit Turkey and travel to the United States. As the eldest son, he is sent on ahead to invest the household treasures in the capital. And the hardships begin. The boy kills a shiftless Turk who has robbed him, loses a second cache in a brothel, and nearly dies in a raided meeting of revolutionaries. Of course Stavros is undaunted. He mutters continually, "I have a plan...
While women of all ages traipse along happily with the trend, the male population has yet to embrace the shift in public. Provocative it may be, hinting at perfections scarcely imagined unless the wearer were rendered shiftless. But as fashion gives way to fat, milady often assumes shapes and sizes that require all-too-little imagination. There is an answer for that, too: the tent shift, a sloping expanse of hopsacking, stretch fabric, burlap or denim that keeps her bulkiest problems right under the Big Top where they belong...
...Honey, Britain's Shelagh Delaney, then a semiliterate 18-year-old, gave tongue richly and scathingly to her bitterly impoverished girlhood in industrial Lancashire. Out of her background, she dramatically distilled a kind of urban folk poetry, humor and wisdom, and in a candidly observed relationship between a shiftless mother and a rebel daughter added fresh scenes to the eternal duelogue of parent and child. At 21, she turned again to the short and simple annals of the poor, which, in her vision, are long and squalid...
These cultists often display unconcealed, and somewhat exaggerated, contempt for entertaining groups like the Kingston Trio and the Limeliters. Folk singing is a religion, in the purists' lexicon, and the big corporate trios are its money-changing De Milles. The high pantheon is made up of all the shiftless geniuses who have shouted the songs of their forebears into tape recorders provided by the Library of Congress. These country "authentics...
...world is deceitful, conniving, and generally up to so good, that he is able to persuade a groundling like me--prepared, if not especially eager, to condemn him as his creator does--that, by Harry and St. George, he's quite right. Nearly everyone around him is shiftless and scheming; but this same nearly everyone around him is also far from being the actor he is--and, consequently, where he is diabolically entertaining, the others are often very tiresome in their rhetoric...