Word: shiftlessness
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Earnest A. Hooton, self-winding Harvard anthropologist, unwound a wallop at love on the dole. "Stupid, shiftless, and improvident human beings breed the most rapidly," he informed a California lecture audience, "because they feel little responsibility to their offspring and recognize no obligation to society. . . . If we must feed and foster the incompetent, we should at the same time prevent their reproducing their kind...
Villagers of Filkins, in the lush green Cotswolds, where Cripps was the local squire, tell a significant story of his earlier days there. Cripps heard that a shiftless villager called Old Joe was in debt. He went to see him. "Nice little house you have here," said Sir Stafford. "You don't want to sell...
...rest of Caldwell's characters are off the same near-caricature assembly line as Molly and Lily. For the perennial Jeeter-type there is Jethro, Putt's shiftless farmhand brother. The strait-laced minister's young wife has "vitamin" binges with Molly on the sly, finally runs off with a salesman. "He [Rev. Bigbee] won't even let me undress without turning out the lights, and I have to wear long-sleeved nightgowns that drag the floor. This morning as soon as he left I took off all my clothes and ran out into the backyard...
Because Mrs. Noggins' husband, Alfred, is a shiftless sort who beetles out for a beer whenever he can, Mrs. Noggins tends their poultry farm. The only papers she reads are those in which the neighbors send over scraps of garbage for the Noggins' poultry. But she keeps up with the news and has her ideas. Reported in Hutchison's widely read columns (seven papers), they have made Mrs. Noggins* one of Canada's best known commentators...
...much higher social position. Marx later repaid Westphalen for this early interest by marrying his daughter, Jenny, against the wishes of her family. And here is Marx the frustrated poet, wasting his time, and his father's (and later his widowed mother's) slim resources as a shiftless college student. Marx finally received a kind of mail-order degree from the University of Jena...