Word: witless
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...inhabitant on file in Washington. On April 14 the identification division of the U. S. Bureau of Investigation had 3,540,784 records of criminals and Federal civil service employes. It receives 2,200 (average) new prints daily, satisfies 45% of the queries it receives concerning arrested, dead and witless citizens. John Edgar Hoover (no kin), Director of the U. S. Bureau of Investigation, does not want his identification division considered a miraculous detective bureau. Says he, contrary to fictioneers: "Since the . . . system utilizes all ten fingers for the classification and filing of prints, it is extremely difficult...
Under such conditions, Mr. Hitler is doing precisely no worse or no better than the heads of other states throughout the world. His conduct has been less suave, his intolerance more witless, but the principle which governs them exists in the same strength and energy everywhere. Persecuting Jews in Germany and threatening Jewish lawyers in Scottsboro are governmental functions differing only in degree. To ignore this elementary fact is to criticize Mr. Hitler with a crass myopia which can scarcely command attention or respect...
Mental disease is a vast public problem. It has become a question of whether to> let people die cancerous and sane, or witless from suspicion of cancer. Cancero-phobia is a serious psychosis...
...President of "the quaint absurdity of a war waged formally between the German Kaiser, the German Tsar, the German King of the Belgians, the German King of England, the German Emperor of Austria." Shaw could see the absurdity of the War, could not see the absurdity of fighting witless circumstance with wit. For all his labors nothing but scandal ensued. Right down to the Treaty of Versailles, when Shaw pleaded for clemency towards Germany his utterances "had about as much effect on the proceedings ... as the buzzing of a London fly has on the meditations of a whale in Baffin...
...piloting. Builders of the ship may well have wondered in idle moments, How serious will be the first accident to ''crash'' U. S. headlines? Who will be the pilot? A foolish stunt flyer descending into a busy street? A drunken playboy flying into the side of a skyscraper? A witless novice slamming the controls this way and that? Last week the builders knew the answers. The accident, at Abilene, Tex., was not serious. But, unfortunately for the 'giro, its story was carried to the front page of practically every newspaper in the land by a highly publicized publicist?Amelia Earhart...