Word: shiftlessness
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...book, he can afford to be tolerant, promiscuous, and amused by the battle of the pigments. "Goo-goo, my high-color belle," he cries, tossing his little daughter Sylvia to the ceiling. "Where do you come into the picture? What's your rating?" Ostracized in her bedroom, shiftless mother Russell sits interminably over her Singer sewing machine and gossips with her "dark" friends about the latest scandalous marriage, in words that read like a Guiana parody of Pride and Prejudice...
Nevertheless, it was a stranger, a shiftless young wayfarer named Jean Sigot, who offered Farmer Talabard a way out of his difficulty. A jobless 19-year-old who had scraped acquaintance with Marie at another dance,. Jean magnanimously offered to marry Marie in return for work and a permanent home at the Talabard farm. Old Pierre leaped at the offer, and the pair were married in April...
...actively evil, but merely weak, his wife has retreated into a cocoon of neuroses. His brother-in-law is a shiftless drunk who pretends he can write, and his journalist daughter is a loveless prig. Sands's first homosexual buddy, a stage designer, has left him for a theatrical producer. His second, a young bookshop manager, is in the clutch of a possessive mother. Bernard Sands feels superior to the shoddy lot until he sees a fellow homosexual dragged away by the police-and suddenly feels ready to side with the law and "join the hounds in the kill...
Models in Manuscript. Author Wecter brings to life the real models of dozens of people and incidents in Mark Twain's books. Huck Finn was Tom Blankenship, the happy, shiftless son of a ne'er-do-well drunk. Sid Sawyer was modeled after Sam's own brother Henry. "Injun Joe," sometimes known as "Injun Aleck," was a drifter from Oklahoma who, according to rumor, had once "somehow lost his interest" in his mother, and hanged her. There really was a cave downriver from Hannibal, too, and Sam himself was once lost in it with a young lady...
...parents (one has three children). So far, the grown-up prodigies have met none of the dire fates that are often predicted for precocious sprouts: not one has cracked up mentally or got into any serious trouble. Not one has even turned out to be just plain shiftless...