"Slipshod" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... book-treasures lying hid in all these ancient towns of Northern France, towns also that lie far off the restless tourist's track, small country towns in which the majority of the houses are slipshod timbered relics of a bygone age. No striking or unusual feature can they offer to the curious, and so for the most part they are dismissed in brief by the guide book. Yet there is many an aged building ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... phrases in the play, and then to applaud them in a Satyr-like manner. Behind Mr. Goodchild, with a party of other Lunatics and one Keeper, the express incarnation of the thing called a 'gent.' A gentleman born; a gent manufactured. A something with a scarf round its neck, and a slipshod speech issuing from behind the scarf; more depraved, more foolish, more ignorant, more unable to believe in any noble or good thing of any kind, than the stupidest Bosjesman. The thing is but a boy in years, and ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... apparatus breaks down, further transmission of messages becomes impossible; but no experience can prove that when the instrument is destroyed, the soul which used it for purposes of communication and self-manifestation ceases to be, and only slipshod logic would draw such an inference. In discussing the Divine Personality, we already quoted Mill, a far more careful reasoner than Haeckel, who laid it down that while experience furnished us with ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... of that well-known name made Julian start; but the Alice who replied to the call ill resembled the vision which his imagination connected with the accents, being a dowdy slipshod wench, the drudge of the low inn which afforded him shelter. She assisted her mistress in putting on the table the dishes which the latter had prepared; and a foaming jug of home-brewed ale being placed betwixt them, was warranted by Dame Whitecraft as excellent; "for," said she, "we know ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... no one must walk slipshod with me. Why, Rosamond," said he, looking at her shoes with disgust, "I thought that you were always neat; no, I cannot take ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... to tell my sensation just then. Frankly, I felt nothing clearly. The only thing I remember distinctly was the third man in the second file held his gun in rather a slipshod manner, aiming it first at my midriff, next pointing it at my nose—which strangely enough caused me intense annoyance. How long we stood thus I don't know. The next thing I remember was a rattle of grounding arms and the sight of two other officers, excitedly gesticulating with ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... intaglio, reveal at a glance his wonderful faculty of design and proportion in the treatment of his work, in which there is not a touch but counts. That is an art of which there are few examples in English; our somewhat diffuse, or slipshod, literary language hardly lending itself to the concentration of thought and expression, which are of the essence of such writing. It is otherwise in French, and if you wish to know what art of that kind can come to, read Merimee's little romances; best of all, perhaps, La Venus d'Ille and ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... This astonishingly slipshod bit of composition is from the pen of the Rev. Dr. Timothy Dwight. If the learned Professor of Divinity in Yale College deemed it worth while to give a little thought to manner as well as to matter, it is probable ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... would spend with her sister at the latter's apartments on High Street. Incidentally Doris was thinking, just a little, of how well her gown and turban became her, for she had determined never to let herself become frowsy and slipshod—Well—she had not to look ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... 160 acres, half of which is summer-fallowed every year; and one man may, in favorable seasons under a carefully planned system, farm as much as 200 acres. If one man attempts to handle a larger farm, the work is likely to be done in so slipshod a manner that the crop yield decreases and the total returns are no larger than if 200 ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe
... injury which McGowan's slipshod work had caused to the "fill," the question of damages and responsibility for the same still hung in the air. The "fill" did not require rebuilding—nor did any part of the main work—a great relief. The loss had not, therefore, been as great as MacFarlane had feared. ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... slipshod, evasive, hypocritical work? Can you afford to shirk, or make-believe or practise pretense in any act of life? No, no; for all the time you are molding yourself into a deformity, and drifting away from the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... the Lost One was still, but the voice was shaking, querulous, half hysterical; the eyes were lighted with a terrible excitement, the lips under the grey moustache twitched; the nervous slipshod dignity of carriage was in curious contrast to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... brought him a blue envelope on a tray. He read it, and a frown gathered on his face. The boy who was translating at the time went on again in his former slipshod manner (which had hitherto provoked only jovial criticism and correction) with complete self-complacency, but found himself sternly brought to book, and burdened by a heavy imposition, before he quite realised that his blunders had ceased ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... found a reviewer of Mr. Tennyson's Princess complaining "that we could have borne rather more polish!" How the fledgling poet of the Maydes Metamorphosis would have fared at the reviewer's hands I tremble to think. But though his rhymes are occasionally slipshod, and the general texture is undeniably thin, still there is something attractive in the young writer's shy tentativeness. The reader who comes to a perusal with the expectation of getting some substantial ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... home every detail of housekeeping was complete and very carefully looked after, while at the Barlows' everything went along in a slipshod, hit-or-miss fashion. ...
— Patty's Summer Days • Carolyn Wells
... self-respect and to numb his despair before the spectacle of his family's downfall. Mrs. Cassatt was as poor a manager as the average woman in whatever walk of life, thanks to the habit of educating woman in the most slipshod fashion, if at all, in any other part of the business but sex-trickery. Thus she was helpless before the tenement conditions. She gave up, went soddenly about in rags with an incredibly greasy and usually dangling ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... played our second game in Brooklyn before a crowd of 3,500, and gave a rather uninteresting exhibition, the Chicagos taking the lead at the start and holding it to the finish, the All-Americas supporting Crane in a very slipshod manner. That same evening we left for Baltimore, where 6,000 people gave us a hearty welcome when we appeared the next afternoon on the Association grounds. Here we put up a good game, the Chicagos winning by a ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... other things, gradually fall into poor hands. Resourceful and prosperous farmers do not care to hold lands under unprosperous landlords. There were farms lying vacant on the Mount Dunstan estate, there were others whose tenants were uncertain rent payers or slipshod workers or dishonest in small ways. Waste or sale of the fertiliser which should have been given to the soil as its due, neglect in the case of things whose decay meant depreciation of property and expense to the landlord, were dishonesties. But ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... as I am when I'm refusing all sorts of invitations that I'd rather die than accept. Slipshod, but you know what I mean. You hate the idea. I'm only just going to tell you my party, so that you may think it over and see if ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... only when they needed it for new gowns, or matinee tickets, or tennis rackets, or some kindred purchase. They needed it desperately, asked for it, got it, spent it, and gave it no further thought. It meant nothing to them that Lizzie was wasteful. It was only to their mother that the girl's slipshod ways ...
— The Treasure • Kathleen Norris
... The slipshod informality of the meal, the constant faultfinding of the hostess, made it something of a trial. Lorelei was not sorry when it was over and Lilas took her to look ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... of easy circumstances who haunt clubs, and dine a great deal at each others' houses and chambers; men who travel regularly a little, and gossip regularly a great deal; who lead a sort of facile, slipshod existence, doing nothing, yet mightily interested in what others do; great critics of little things; profuse in minor luxuries and inclined to the respectable practice of a decorous profligacy; peering through the window of a clubhouse as if they were ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... never slipshod, about a matter of business. Owning the property through her Board of Waxworks was safe enough, still it was sound business to set another grip on it to cover accidents, and she did it. Her barkers (what a curious ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... intelligently given, and their relative importance is well estimated. Throughout, the paper is admirably proportioned and well edited, the paragraphs being much more carefully written than in any London paper except the Times. There is rarely a slipshod sentence to be found in any part of the paper, which is the more remarkable as slipshod writing is a noticeable characteristic of almost every other colonial paper. The leading articles are for the most part supplied by contributors not on the permanent ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... should have been the black outline of a guillotine against that heavy red and white of the morning. Dr. Bull was in his white shirt and black breeches only; his cropped, dark head might well have just come out of its wig; he might have been Marat or a more slipshod Robespierre. ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... write simpler and stronger English than the celebrated Boz, and this renders us the more annoyed at those manifold vulgarities and slipshod errors, which unhappily have of late years disfigured his productions."—LIVING AUTHORS OF ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... two classes formed more than half the printed literature of those unhappy times, and the remainder of the output of the press was pretty well filled up with sermons, exhortations, and other religious writings. The rapidity with which the literature was turned out accounts for the wretched and slipshod appearance it presents. Any old types or blocks were brought into use, and there is evidence of blocks and initial letters which had formed part of the stock of the printers of a century earlier being brought to light again at this time. Unfortunately ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... been directed how to hem a handkerchief. I had tried to dust my room one day, and the effort had tired me dreadfully, and did not look very well, as a result. I could not teach. I had been educated in a slipshod way, no one directing anything about it—just what it occurred to the person who had charge of me to ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris
... life is the legion of Congressional claimants, who come here session after session, and too often grow old and destitute while unsuccessfully prosecuting before Congress a claim which is just, but in some respects irregular. These ruined suitors, threadbare and slipshod, begging or borrowing their daily bread, recall Charles Dickens' portraiture of the Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce Chancery suite, which had become so complicated that no one alive knew what it meant. The French spoilation claims that were being vigorously prosecuted ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... Mawwowbone!" This was very articulately delivered, the previous, or slipshod, pronunciation having been more ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... hypocrites, Externally devoted apes, base snites, Puffed-up, wry-necked beasts, worse than the Huns, Or Ostrogoths, forerunners of baboons: Cursed snakes, dissembled varlets, seeming sancts, Slipshod caffards, beggars pretending wants, Fat chuffcats, smell-feast knockers, doltish gulls, Out-strouting cluster-fists, contentious bulls, Fomenters of divisions and debates, Elsewhere, not here, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... Mahmud's persistency was the 'Turkey' we have seen in our own time—that Turkey irretrievably Asiatic in spirit under a semi-European system of administration, which has governed despotically in the interests of one creed and one class, with slipshod, makeshift methods, but has always governed, and little by little has extended its range. Knowing its imperfections and its weakness, we have watched with amazement its hand feeling forward none the less towards one remote frontier district after another, painfully but surely getting its ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... stands between Americans and good writing is usually want of culture; we write as well as we know how, while in England the obstacle seems to be merely a boorish whim. The style of English books and magazines is growing far less careful than ours,—less finished, less harmonious, more slipshod, more slangy. What second-rate American writer would see any wit in describing himself, like Dean Alford in his recent book on language, as "an old party in a shovel"? These bad examples are to be regretted; for doubtless ten times as many original works are annually published ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... he knew very well that such forms are not strictly grammatical. In this fashionable whim could be discerned a survival of the habits of the times of Alexander. The exquisites of those days, on the rare occasions when they spoke their own language, made use of such slipshod forms; as much as to say, 'We, of course, are born Russians, at the same time we are great swells, who are at liberty to neglect the rules of scholars'); 'I am tryin' to prove by that, sir, that without the sense of personal dignity, without self-respect—and these two ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... which the new master had inaugurated, things at the Abbey House had never been done with so much dignity and good style. There had been a slipshod ease, an old-fashioned liberality in the housekeeping during the Squire's reign, which had in some measure approximated to the popular idea of an Irish household. Now all was done by line and rule, and according to the latest standard ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... when Aunt Judy said, "So-and-so b'longs to our family," she included every man, woman, and child who could produce the genuine patent of our nobility, and especially all who had ever worn our livery, from my great-grandfather's tremendous coachman to the slipshod young gal that "nussed" our last new cousin's last new baby. Sometimes one of these cousins—quite telescopic, so distant was the relationship—would come to dine with us. Then Aunt Judy, in gorgeous turban, immaculate neckerchief, and lively satisfaction, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... conveyed by eloquent facts fell upon deaf ears. Yet it was manifest, in view of Germany's ingenious combination of economics and politics, and the irresistible co-operation of the State and individuals in applying it, that the slipshod methods of Britain and France could no longer be persisted in without grave danger to these states. To deal with trade and industry as though they were matters that concerned only the particular business firms engaged in them was no ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... that formerly the feet (the metrical feet) of the Caoinan were much attended to; but on the decline of the Irish bards these feet were gradually neglected, and the Caoinan fell into a sort of slipshod metre amongst women. Each province had different Caoinans, or at least different imitations of the original. There was the Munster cry, the Ulster cry, &c. It became an extempore performance, and every set of keepers varied the melody according to ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... our railways build by the roadside, of deal boards on end, irregular and careless without being picturesque, and too closely associated with pigsty construction, in my mind, to be worth drawing. When Ruskin came back I had made a careless and slipshod five minutes' sketch, not worth the paper it was on, as to me were not the originals. Ruskin was angry, and he had a right to be; for at least I should have found it enough that he wanted it done, to make me do my best on it, but I did not think of it in that light. We drove back towards Geneva ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... The slipshod methods of naturalization have been revealed since the new law (1906) has been in force. Tens of thousands of voters who thought they were citizens found that their papers were only declarations of intentions, or "first papers." Other tens of thousands had lost even ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... had seen him conducting Lady Sitwell in to dinner, or had heard him talking to her with quaint yet graceful gallantry, you would have inferred that the earlier period of his life had been passed in more stately society than could be found in Shepperton, and that his slipshod chat and homely manners were but like weather-stains on a fine old block of marble, allowing you still to see here and there the fineness of the grain, and the delicacy of the original tint. But in his later years these visits became a little too troublesome to the ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... Dickens, as being an author whose books she knew fairly well, and by dint of much brain racking and real hard labour contrived to give some slight sketch of his life and an appreciation of his genius. She was painfully conscious, however, that the result was poor, the style slipshod, and the general composition lacking both in unity and finish. She pulled a long face as she signed ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... also for the purity and excellence of its style. We fear, however, it can no longer arrogate to itself praise on this special score. There have been books produced among us during the last twenty years, which have failed in making their way into England, mainly in consequence of the slipshod style in which they were written. A busy age, much agitated by controversy, is no doubt unfavourable to the production of compositions of classic beauty. 'The rounded period,' says an ingenious French writer, 'opens up the long ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... added to the family income by going out charring. She was a big woman, with a rough voice, and slipshod in walk; her hands were red and hard from much scrubbing and polishing, and she was considered generally by the servants in the establishments at which she worked to be a low person. But Sarah's heart was in the right place; ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... of Cooper—his stilted style and slipshod English, his tedious moralizing, his artificial dialogue, his stuffed gentlemen and inane "females," his blunders in woodcraft—all these are so easily discovered by a casual reader that the historian need ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... these Readings, and suddenly and for the first time assumed to themselves a distinct importance and individuality. Take, for instance, the nameless lodging-housekeeper's slavey, who assists at Bob Sawyer's party, and who is described in the original work as "a dirty, slipshod girl, in black cotton stockings, who might have passed for the neglected daughter of a superannuated dustman in very reduced circumstances." No one had ever realised the crass stupidity of that remarkable young person—dense and impenetrable as a London fog—until her first introduction in these ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... of which he had his share, had dimmed the recollection of his defeat at the 'Hotch Potch'; and now in his thoughts it was enshrined as the Queen of Clubs. He would have been a member all these years himself, but, owing to the slipshod way his proposer, Jack Herring, had gone to work, they had not known what they were doing in keeping him out. Why! they had taken his son Jo at once, and he believed the boy was still a member; he had received a letter dated from there eight ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... prolonged overstrain, under-rest, or underfeeding of the system. Neurasthenia is the "fatigue neurosis," as a leading expert terms it. It may be due to any morbid condition under heaven. It is "that blessed word Mesopotamia" of the slipshod diagnostician. Nearly one-fourth of the cases which come into our sanatoria for tuberculosis have been diagnosed and treated for months and even years as "neurasthenia." It satisfies the patient—and it means nothing; though some experts contend for a distinct disease ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... faced the boy like a rat, but the alertness faded instantly from his eye, and his lip slackened into a slipshod smile. "Why, yes, sonny, me and my grub-stake. You've been to school, I'll bet, but they didn't learn yu' Chinook, now, did they? Chinook's the lingo us white folks trade in with the Siwashes, and we kinder falls into it, ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... stately precision he took up the neat bundle of checks which he had just indorsed, ran them over, slipped one from under the rubber band, and scanned it with great deliberation. He could not afford to offend a good customer, but he could thus subtly rebuke such hasty and slipshod methods. ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... meager, jejune, vapid, bland, trashy, lukewarm, cold, frigid, poor, dull, dry, languid; colorless, enervated; proposing, prosy, prosaic; unvaried, monotonous, weak, washy, wishy-washy; sketchy, slight. careless, slovenly, loose, lax (negligent) 460; slipshod, slipslop[obs3]; inexact; puerile, childish; flatulent; rambling ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... absence of an influence is sometimes as significant as the presence of it. The looseness of Wergeland's style, its frothy abundance, its digressions and parentheses, its slipshod violence, would be to Ibsen so many beacons of warning, to be viewed with horror and alarm. A poem of three stanzas, "To the Poets of Norway," only recently printed, dates from his early months in Christiania, ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... economists who still hold that "a demand for commodities is not a demand for labour," they may be reminded that a paradox is not necessarily true. In fact, this particular paradox is seen to be sustained by a combination of slipshod reasoning and moral prejudice. The growing opinion of economic students is veering round to register in theory the firm empirical judgment from which the business world has never swerved, that a high rate of consumption is the ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... accommodating "the milky mother" with the food which she should have received two hours sooner, a slipshod wench peeped into the stable, and perceiving that a stranger was employed in discharging the task which she, at length, and reluctantly, had quitted her ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... show slipshod in spots. They talked to him about it and he laughed at them. Then, one day, he left them in the ditch on the big story of the McManus indictment, and the whole town scooped him, and the managing editor told him that he must go. His lapses had become too frequent. ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... cheering about the first meal in the vast dining-hall of this hotel. The floor was of marble—scrupulously clean—and the Javanese waiters were dressed in a uniform of white trimmed with red, presenting a pleasing contrast to the slipshod dirty "boy" of an ordinary hotel, whose habit it is to clatter round flapping your face and brushing your food with his long, unclean, hanging sleeves. Though in the native states from whence X. came it is ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser
... for protection against the sun or rain are balanced on the head like an inverted sieve. When carried in the hand they may readily be mistaken for shields. In addition to this, the men carry bamboo spears with iron points as a slipshod measure of defence against possible attacks from wild animals. When viewed from a respectable distance these articles invest the ultra-gentle Bengali with a suggestion of being on the war-path, a delusion that is really ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... he said it; but the words were hearty, and Colonel John made no demur. And Darby, entering at that moment with a pair of lights in tall candlesticks—which were silver, but might have been copper—caused a welcome interruption. A couple of footboys, with slipshod feet and bare ankles, bore in the meats after him and slapped them down on the table; at the same moment the O'Beirnes and two or three more of the "family" entered from the back. Their coming lightened ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... hand. Schlieben frowned; he was strangely irritable to-day. At any other time he would have been struck by the celerity with which the boy had finished the work he had neglected; but to-day the careless writing, the inkspots in the margin, the slipshod manner in which it had all been done, which seemed to him to point to a want ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig
... colloquially, the deed by which that possession is proved. Sclamber, to scramble. Sculduddery, impropriety, grossness. Session, the Court of Session, the supreme court of Scotland. Shauchling, shuffling, slipshod. Shoo, to chase gently. Siller, money. Sinsyne, since then. Skailing, dispersing. Skelp, slap. Skirling, screaming. Skriegh-o'day, daybreak. Snash, abuse. Sneisty, supercilious. Sooth, to hum. Sough, sound, murmur. ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... understand yet?" Jason asked. "By tying up Snarbi I'm only conforming to a local code of ethic, like saluting in the army or not eating with your fingers in polite society. In fact I'm being a little slipshod, since by local custom I should kill him before he can make ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... newspapers, produced an enormous amount of work in various literary forms; in the drama he claimed to have had 'an entire hand, or at least a maine finger' in no less than two hundred and twenty plays. Inevitably, therefore, he is careless and slipshod, but some of his portrayals of sturdy English men and women and of romantic adventure (as in 'The Fair Maid of the West') are of refreshing naturalness and breeziness. Thomas Middleton, also a very prolific writer, often deals, like Jonson and Heywood, with sordid material. John Marston, as ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... abridgment of a tragedy by Dekker and Webster on the story of Lady Jane Grey. In this tragedy, as in the two comedies due to the collaboration of the same poets, it appears to me more than probable that Dekker took decidedly the greater part. The shambling and slipshod metre, which seems now and then to hit by mere chance on some pure and tender note of simple and exquisite melody—the lazy vivacity and impulsive inconsequence of style—the fitful sort of slovenly inspiration, with interludes of absolute and headlong ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... apparently eight or ten years of age, playing in the streets with no other clothing than a shirt reaching to the knees, and women peddlers of mineral water dressed in ragged red blouses and blue skirts, who, with disordered hair and stockingless, slipshod feet, shuffled by pushing hand-carts ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... obloquy, having represented Pluto, the god of wealth, in the act of carrying off a female Proserpine, but the figures so Lilliputian, and in such a disproportionate expansion of confused sceneries, that the elopement produced but a very paltry impression. The slipshod carelessness of this painter may be realised from the fact that in a composition styled "Blue Lights to Warn Steamboats off Shoal Water," the blue lights are conspicuous by their total absence, and the mistiness of the atmospherical ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... conscientiously, if I may say so. I mean that she availed herself of its modulations to give thrilling emphasis to what was profound in her utterances, and sweetness to what was gentle or playful. She bestowed great care too on her enunciation, disliking the slipshod mode of pronouncing which is so common. I have several times heard her declare with enthusiasm that ours is a beautiful language, a noble language even to the ear, when properly spoken; and imitate with disgust the short, snappy, inarticulate way in which many people utter it. There was ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... million. The sky would then no longer be brass, or the face of the country a quarry." Thanks to his researches, Burton has made his name historical in the Holy Land, for his book Unexplored Syria—written though it be in a distressingly slipshod style—throws, from almost every page, interesting light on the Bible. "Study of the Holy Land," he said, "has the force of a fifth Gospel, not only because it completes and harmonises, but also ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... that Helen should go, and about four o'clock she found herself ringing at the cottage over whose door hung the sign: "Miss M. Hazelton, Fashionable Dressmaker." She was at home, so said the little slipshod girl who answered the ring, and in a few moments Helen was talking with Marian Hazelton, whose face showed signs of recent illness, but, nevertheless, very attractive, from its peculiarly sad expression ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... They go shuffling along, precisely as if their shoes were down at the heel—"slipshod"—and they could not lift up their feet in consequence. If it is dusty or sandy, they kick up the dust before them and fill their skirts with it. This is exceedingly ungraceful. If I were a gentleman, I really do not think I could ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... of your white shirts. He wore a cheap horrid cotton thing, and I knew it would look ridiculous. And then his shoes were so slipshod, I let him have a pair of yours, the old ones ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... style. In "Cecilia" the style shows more of conscious art, and is more laboured. In "Camilla" and "The Wanderer" it is at once more careless and more affected than in the earlier novels ; her English is at times slipshod, at times disfigured by attempts at fine writing. But, admitting all this, we must admit also that Fanny, even in "The Wanderer," proves herself mistress of what we may surely regard as the most essential part of style-its power of affecting the reader ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... apparently occupied by persons of an indigent class. At one of these was a sign denoting it to be the residence of a tailor. Seated on a bench at the door was a young man, with coarse uncombed locks, breeches knee-unbuttoned, stockings ungartered, shoes slipshod and unbuckled, and a face unwashed, gazing stupidly from hollow eyes. His aspect was embellished with good nature, ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... isn't great; There are slipshod lines in Shelley; Every one knows Homer's fate; Some of ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... appliances here to administer an anaesthetic or do anything else properly," answered Morris impatiently, "and no one can tell from a cursory examination whether or not there are other injuries, to say nothing of the danger from septicaemia if the work is done in a clumsy, slipshod manner." ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... the ricketty stairs and paused at the door of a room, which a slipshod woman had pointed out as that of the 'murderer's daughter.' He knocked, but there was no reply; he knocked again, but all was silent. Then he opened ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... it at Lausanne, he was sending it piecemeal to his friend Robert Henley in England for Henley to make an English version, of course to be revised by himself. As soon as Henley had all the parts, he published a hasty and slipshod translation, before Beckford had seen it or was even ready to publish the French original; and not only did so, but published it as a tale translated by himself from a genuine Arabic original. This double violation of good faith of course enraged Beckford, and practically separated the two men for ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Well she knew what would happen if the work were left in Nan's care. Crooked cloth, forks and spoons looking as if they had been tossed upon the table; as likely as not, no cruets nor water-bottles; and a general air of slipshod carelessness, which would more than defeat all ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... missionary, I was led through a number of rooms and courts to see Chung- wang privately. I was brought into one of his private sitting-rooms, where he sat clothed loosely in white silk, with a red kerchief round his head, and a jewel in front. He was seated in an easy chair, and fanned by a pretty slipshod girl. He asked me to a seat beside him and questioned me about a map he had seen with parallel lines running each way, said to have been made by foreigners, asked me to explain what it was. He also showed ...
— General Gordon - Saint and Soldier • J. Wardle
... of long and careful weighing of all the pros and cons. I have some doubt about the seventh letter, which, read by the light of George Sand's letter, ought perhaps to be placed after the ninth. But the seventh letter is somewhat of a puzzle. Puzzles, owing to his confused statements and slipshod style, are, however, not a rare thing in Chopin's correspondence. The passage in the above-mentioned letter of George Sand runs thus: "Pauline leaves me on the 16th [of August]; Maurice goes on the 17th to fetch his sister, who should be ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... Bartlemy, "I don't regret your goose and cabbage!" and having said this, he ran away as hard as he could, dropping one of his slipshod shoes as he went along, with his master pursuing after, yard stick in hand, whom, however, he soon ...
— Funny Big Socks - Being the Fifth Book of the Series • Sarah L. Barrow
... that short distance he is taking no chances. But while he nurses his vitality and cares for his health he does not use the sun as an excuse for laziness or for slipshod work. I have never seen a place in the tropics where, in spite of the handicap of damp, fierce heat, the officers and civil officials are so keenly and constantly employed, where the bright work was so bright, and ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... topic, you should first of all think it through. In doing this, arrange your ideas as consistently and logically as you can, and test them with your reason. Then set them forth in language which shall be lucid and exact. Tolerate no slipshod diction, no vaguely rendered general meanings. Send every sentence, every word like a skilful drop-kick—straight above the crossbar. When you have done your best with the topic, lay it by for a space. Time is a great revealer of hidden defects, and you must ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... taste or discrimination. Shakespeare had a finer conception of form, but even he was contented to take all his ancient history from North's translation of Plutarch and dramatise his subject without further inquiry. Jonson was a scholar and a classical antiquarian. He reprobated this slipshod amateurishness, and wrote his "Sejanus" like a scholar, reading Tacitus, Suetonius, and other authorities, to be certain of his facts, his setting, and his atmosphere, and somewhat pedantically noting his authorities in the ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... suggestive—and likely I hope to do good; and though I am rather scared at the thought of a fresh eye going over its 4,000 lines—discovering blemishes of all sorts which my one wit cannot avail to detect, fools treated as sages, obscure passages, slipshod verses, and much that worse is,—yet on the whole I am not much afraid of the issue, and I would give something to be allowed to read it some morning to you—for every rap o' the knuckles I should get a clap ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... ring brought results. A slipshod servant appeared and reluctantly seated me in the hall. She read with seeming interest the card I handed to her and then, pushing aside some mangy looking ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... too, is our boasted independence! What superb economists are we! Astonishment follows upon an audit of our slipshod accounts at the amount spent unconsciously on small things which do not directly affect the actual cost of living. Taking the mean of several years' expenditure, the item "postage stamps" is a little larger than the cost of my own clothing and boots. ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... she played less feverishly, but there was nothing slipshod about her performance. The chubby songster found time to proffer brief explanations in asides. "They want the patriotic stuff. It used to be all that Hawaiian dope, and Wild Irish Rose junk, and songs about wanting to go back to every place from Dixie to Duluth. But now seems it's ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... say, Thompson let himself out. No puerile repetition; no slovenly, slipshod work there. It was the performance of a born orator and poet, and one who, like Timothy, had known the Scriptures from a child—a long, involved litany of seething malediction, delivered, moreover, with a measured and effortless eloquence and a grammatical exactitude which left St. Ernulphus ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... no such thing as atheism," Ont insisted. "I merely said that the reasoning used by the ancients to arrive at the Creator was the most slipshod and illogical possible. There was another line used long ago that was more solid, but still very weak. It started out with the statement, 'I can be aware of nothing but thoughts.' External stimuli, if such there are, must be transformed ...
— The Unthinking Destroyer • Roger Phillips
... the wet at every step from the long grass. The pins in her shoes at first acted as spurs, pricking her for many steps, and then crooking and giving way; so that she had the comfort of running slipshod the rest of the way. Her shoes, being of stuff, were so thoroughly soaked, in a little time, that they became quite heavy. The gate at the end of the field was locked, of course; who ever came to ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... the half-sovereign again, and then set off at a shuffling slipshod trot after them. They had resumed their walk before she reached them, but the boy looking back, saw her, and told the other, who wheeled round sharply, ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... me—I was in the open air. The address of Mary Simms was in a street not far from my own suburb. Without any power of reasoning, I found myself before the door of the house. I knocked, and asked a slipshod girl who opened the door to me for "Miss Simms." She knew no such person, held a brief shrill colloquy with some female in the back-parlor, and, on coming back, was about to shut the door in my face, when a voice from above—the voice of her I sought—called down ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... dilapidated sheds, leaning in all directions. A mob of sheep was penned in a yard outside one of the sheds; and in the garden an old woman, white-haired and wrinkled, with a very short dress showing a lot of dirty stocking and slipshod elastic-sided boot, was bending over ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... homesickness swept over her. But what was it she wanted, she asked herself, in place of this gay kaleidoscope of light and color and ceaseless confusion? Not the stagnation of the Bartlett household, certainly not the slipshod poverty of the Martels. She searched her ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... this shortcoming discloses itself in many and various ways, it is to be observed chiefly in the matter of literary style. Women enjoy a reputation for slipshod style. They have earned it. A long and intimate familiarity with the manuscript of hundreds of women writers, renowned and otherwise, has convinced me that not ten per cent of them can be relied upon to satisfy even the most ordinary tests in spelling, grammar, ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... years of sorrow and misfortune had changed that dapper young beau into a careless, hopeless pessimist. What the end might have been but for Peggy is hard to guess, but the past two years had made him think and think hard too. Though still slipshod of speech as the result of associating with his humbler neighbors, he was certainly making good, and few lapses occurred as he shook hands with Nelly's friends and then went out to help them mount. In his dark gray suit, Alpine hat and his gray gloves, something of the gentleman ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... supper, good bed, good attendance; nothing out of repair; no things pressed into services for what they were never intended by nature or art; none of what are vulgarly called MAKE-SHIFTS. No chambermaid slipshod, or waiter smelling of whisky; but all tight and right, and everybody doing their own business, and doing it as if it was their everyday occupation, not as if it was done by particular desire, for first or last time this season. The landlord came in at supper ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... lips to heel!" said Phillotson; but so faintly that in closing the door she did not hear it. The dread of a reactionary change in the schoolmaster's sentiments, coupled, perhaps, with a faint shamefacedness at letting even him know what a slipshod lack of thoroughness, from a man's point of view, characterized her transferred allegiance, prevented her telling him of her, thus far, incomplete relations with Jude; and Phillotson lay writhing like a man in hell as he pictured the prettily dressed, maddening compound of sympathy ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... enforce such contracts which gives the foreign merchant his poor opinion of Japanese commercial honesty. In time, when the Japanese have learned that they must abide by written contracts, these complaints will be heard no longer. The present slipshod methods are due to faulty business customs, the outgrowth of the old Samurai contempt ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... slipshod in her apparel, and she may, if she chooses, be a society and club woman as well. Surely there is nothing in literary culture which shall prevent neatness and propriety in dress as well ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... the Lord's Prayer. The same statement has been repeated ad nauseam by ten generations of critics for 360 years. The words with which our Saviour closed His pattern prayer are accordingly rejected as an interpolation resulting from the liturgical practice of the primitive Church. And this slipshod account of the matter is universally acquiesced in by learned and unlearned readers alike at the ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... find art," said Whistler. We will not get the Ideal Commonwealth until we get Ideal People; and we will not get an ideal philosophy until we get an ideal philosopher. Place the mentally and morally slipshod in ideal surroundings and they will quickly evolve a slum, just as did John Shakespeare, when at Stratford he was fined two pounds ten for maintaining a sequinarium. All we can say for John is that he was the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... his wife) repeating the same action and the same two or three words for a whole weary afternoon. And yet he gained and retained warm feelings from far the most of those who fell under his domination, and particularly (it is pleasant to remember) from the girls. After the slipshod training and the incomplete accomplishments of a girls' school, there was something at first annoying, at last exciting and bracing, in this high standard of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... too, life was becoming a thing of more sober hues. Sick of slipshod morality, men were sending for their wives and children. The old ideals of home and love and social purity were triumphing. With the advent of the good woman, the dance-hall girl was doomed. The city was finding itself. Society divided into sets. The more pretentious ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... marine-insurance office, there to spin yarns of gale and shipwreck with a crew of old seadogs like himself. The blast will put in its word among their hoarse voices, and be understood by all of them. Next I meet an unhappy slipshod gentleman with a cloak flung hastily over his shoulders, running a race with boisterous winds and striving to glide between the drops of rain. Some domestic emergency or other has blown this miserable man from his warm fireside in quest of a doctor. See that little ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... thinks that this and other changes, "which are all in the direction of the slipshod and the commonplace, were made on Hunt's suggestion, and that Keats acquiesced from fatigue or indifference." To accuse Hunt of wishing to alter "knight-at-arms" to "wretched wight" seems to me unwarrantable guessing. Surely a much more likely explanation is that Keats, ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... get a thorough education," was the answer, "whether or not you ultimately become a writer. This education is indispensable for whatever career you select, and it must not be slipshod or sketchy. You should ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... speed). a la espanola (in the Spanish fashion). a troche y moche, a trochimoche (in a slipshod way). con blandura (gently). de mala gana (unwillingly). de vez (or de cuando) en cuando (from time to time). tal cual vez (once in a while). un si es, ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano
... eyes followed every stick of timber, every foot of piping, every nail that was placed. There was no escaping his watchfulness. If corners were not true or moldings did not meet he saw and called attention to it. Many a time a slipshod workman was ready to throw him over the cliff into the sea and perhaps might have done so had he not been conscious of the justice of ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... have promptly resented any undue familiarity. He was a man of the most exact habits, painfully conscientious in all his dealings, and absolutely devoid of vices, unless, indeed, his extravagance in the purchase of old furniture might be classed under that head. To people of slipshod habits, his painstaking exactness was of course highly exasperating, and I often myself felt that he was in need of a redeeming vice. If I could have induced him to smoke, take snuff, or indulge in a little innocent gambling, I believe it would have given me a good deal of ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... perfectly right in regard to the 'slipshod' Endymion... it is as good as I had the power to make it by myself. I have written independently, without judgement, I may write independently and ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... than the man who can override great obstacles. When a young man becomes so ambitious for large success that he overlooks the small things, he is pretty apt to encounter failure. There is nothing in business so infinitesimal that we can afford to do it in a slipshod fashion. It is no art to answer twenty letters in a morning when they are, in reality, only half answered. When we commend brevity in business letters, we do not mean brusqueness. Nothing stamps the character of a house so clearly as the letters ...
— The Young Man in Business • Edward W. Bok
... every one. So has Elizabeth and Essex's quarrel been treated. There was some evil in Essex; therefore Elizabeth was a fool for liking him. There was some good in Essex; therefore Elizabeth was cruel in punishing him. This is the sort of slipshod dilemma by which Elizabeth is proved to be wrong, even while Essex is confessed to be wrong too; while the patent facts of the case are, that Elizabeth bore with him as long as she could, and a great deal longer than any one ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... writer (who had made up his mind long before that the verses in question are to be rejected) no doubt perceived that this would be the most convenient way of disposing of the evidence for and against: but one is at a loss to understand how English scholars can have acquiesced in such a slipshod statement for well nigh a hundred years. A very little study of the subject would have shewn them that Griesbach derived the first eleven of his references from Wetstein,(194) the last fourteen from Birch.(195) As for Scholz, he ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... Dictionary"—when I came across the word "scamp." It is a handy word to fling, and I am not sure but that it has been gently tossed once or twice in my direction. Condemnation is usually a sort of subtle flattery, so I'm not sad. To scamp means to cut short, to be superficial, slipshod, careless, indifferent—to say, "Let 'er go, who cares—this is good enough!" If anybody ever was a stickler for honest work, I am that bucolic party. I often make things so fine that only one man out of ten thousand can buy them, and I ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... is mastered by attention to the details we have discussed, and until we habitually notice these things our reading is apt to be slipshod and profitless. It will help us to retain these facts in mind if we put them ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... names—we always wrote our best for Stevenson. To him each writer amongst us—small or more than small—had been proud to have carried his best. That best might be poor enough. So long as it was not slipshod, Stevenson could forgive. While he lived, he moved men to put their utmost even into writings that quite certainly would never meet his eye. Surely another age will wonder over this curiosity of letters—that ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the thing. It was a great mistake when they were abandoned. Then everyone knew where they were. If there was a mistake in the pleading then the whole case was thrown out of court. That was as it should be. Men had to be good and careful lawyers in those days. The slipshod methods of the ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... strolling on, comparing the cramped misty London aspect of things with his visionary free dream of the glorious prairies, where his other life was: the forests, the mountains, the endless expanses; the horses, the flocks, the slipshod ease of language and attire; and the grog-shops. Aha! There could be no mistake about him as a gentleman and a scholar out there! Nor would Nature shut up her pocket and demand innumerable things of him, as civilization ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... be found in his letters. A number remain. They might seem to be written by two different men! Half a dozen are models of that language he adored—they cost him, to our knowledge, many days—the rest are slipshod notes that any man might write, for he thought they would not survive, and, indeed, the majority of his editors have had the ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... cap-stern when the anchor's up to the bows; but what a man likes is, not to be disturbed by vagaries, or gusts of temper. Well, Bill was happy—but one day he was devilish unhappy, because Sall had lost one of her shoes, which wasn't to be wondered at, considering as how she was always slipshod. 'Who has seen my wife's shoe?' says he. 'Hang your wife's shoe,' said one, 'it warn't worth casting an eye upon;' Still he cried out, 'Who has seen my wife's shoe?' 'I seed it,' says another. 'Where?' says Bill. 'I ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... surprised, but answered in the affirmative, and a slipshod girl ushered him into a long back room, filled with boxes for the accommodation of parties, in one of which he took his seat. In a more miserably forlorn place he could not have found himself: the room smelt of fish, and sawdust, and stale tobacco smoke, with a slight ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... for hard and strenuous work. I do not at all wish to make work slipshod and dilettante. I would raise the standards of simple education, and force boys to show that they are working honestly. I want energy and zeal above everything. But my honest belief is that you cannot ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... day, "I don't wan' to hear you talk in that slipshod way any longer before Flaxen. You know better; you've had more chance than I have—be'n to school more. They ain't no excuse for you, not an ioty. Now, I'm goin' to say to her, 'Never mind how I talk, but talk ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... turns duty into delight, toil into joy, and makes us love better to do what will please our beloved Lover than anything besides. Why did Jesus Christ say,'My yoke is easy and My burden is light'? Was it because He diminished the weight of duties or laid down an easier slipshod morality than had been enjoined before? No! He intensified it all, and His Commandment is far harder to flesh and blood than any commandments that were ever given. But for all that, the yoke that ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... was not the medium of haste, passion, prejudice, and faction. He fully recognized all its responsibilities, and the need of meeting them and respecting them by other than casual, haphazard, and slipshod methods. He was an economist of words, with an abhorrence of redundance and irrelevance; not only an economist of words, but also an economist of syllables, choosing always the fewer, and losing nothing ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... young Englishmen more of that which it is profoundly important they should know, but which at present remains hidden from them, than any other instructor; and, incidentally, they would learn to know good English when they see or hear it—perhaps even to discriminate between slipshod copiousness and true eloquence, and that alone would be ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley |
