Word: slothly
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Seven were the sins-pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy and sloth -that the early Christian theologians labeled capital, or deadly, on the ground that they led to the commission of other offenses against God.* For most 20th century men, the list seems a trifle quaint. In a world where millions are hungry because there is too little food, and millions more because they are dieting, gluttony, for example, takes on certain ironies...
...SLOTH, which St. Thomas defined as "sadness in the face of spiritual good/' is very much present in modern novels and plays, writes Evelyn Waugh. It is personified by the man who lost his faith "as though faith were an extraneous possession like an umbrella, which can be inadvertently left behind in a railway-carriage." Waugh also argues that a sin closely allied to sloth, pigritia (slackness), is gaining: people have "'no time' to read or cook or even to dress decorously, while in their offices and workshops they do less and less, in quality and quantity...
...this might seem to be gilding the lily, for Stanford was born rich in 1885, when Railroad Tycoon Leland Stanford launched it with the world's then biggest endowment-$21 million and 8,800 acres 30 miles south of San Francisco. Unhappily, wealth bred sloth at Stanford. It let its lavish Neo-Romanesque premises molder. Deluged with veterans after World War II, it was soon in serious trouble...
...place them ahead of everyone else in a less remarked achievement: the creation of unforgettably grotesque characters. From Mikhail Saltykov's hypocritical Yudushka ("Little Judas") Golovlev, to Ivan Goncharov's chaise-longue lizard, Ilya Oblomov, whose lumpish name has become a Russian household word for will-less sloth, Russian writing throbs with the howls and sneers of a whole menagerie of literary monsters...
...responsibility and tell the truth to a nation that has been gulled into believing that urban fallout shelters offer real protection in war. It must refuse to build, and do so with such clarity and force that there can be no inference that the decision was born of sloth or niggardliness...