Word: slapdash
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...public opinion in the U.S. and Western Europe has not seen any strategic or humanitarian interests at sufficient risk to justify the sacrifice of one soldier's life. Even a carefully planned intervention that matches adequate force to clear and achievable political aims may not change that opinion. A slapdash expedition for unclear ends would have no chance...
...Apropos of nothing" -- why does everyone keep starting sentences this way? People use this slapdash transition to jump from one thought to the next, their conversation tracking like a string of commercials. Warning: non sequiturs ahead...
...dark side is that slapdash recusal can degenerate into a form of internal book burning, a crank's bonfire. The hyperactive recuser lives next door to the know-nothings and crackpots. He is liable to mutter to himself in public. Intelligent recusal must be elegantly done. There are rules. No ethnic slurs. Avoid recusing yourself on entire countries, such as Canada. Do not go scything down whole fields of knowledge. (On the other hand, I long ago recused myself on the subject of economics, about which I am a moron, and have not suffered a day's unhappiness because...
...game: some are real, others are small air-conditioning vents, still others are dummies, there simply to complete a pattern. What would otherwise be prosaic necessities, scattered helter-skelter, become handsome details, all conveying the worthy message that the humdrum texture of modern life need not be arbitrary and slapdash...
Last week's results, while they seemed promising, had a hurried, slapdash quality to them. The jury-rigged experiments were based largely on what researchers had seen in the popular press and copies of the sketchy initial paper by Pons and Fleischmann, which began circulating by fax machine almost at once. At Texas A&M, chemists reported they had measured between 60% and 80% more heat energy coming out of the experiment than had gone in. But they had to try the experiment five times before it worked. They did not even attempt to detect any neutrons being given...