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Half-baked   Listen
adjective
half-baked  adj.  
1.
Insufficiently or poorly planned or thought out; impractical or unrealistic; as, a half-baked proposal; half-baked ideas; of plans, theories, proposals, etc.
2.
Insufficiently cooked; of food.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Half-baked" Quotes from Famous Books



... proprietors to get money enough to go on with the second; old speculators failed and were succeeded by new; foundations sank from bad digging; walls were blown down in high winds from hasty building; bricks were called for in such quantities, and seized on in such haste, half-baked from the kilns, that they set the carts on fire, and had to be cooled in pails of water before they could be erected into walls—and still the new suburb defied all accidents, and grew irrepressibly into a little town of houses, ready to be ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins

... on mess pork and 'salt-horse' for weeks, and both the meat and the half-baked dough served to them for bread are enough to break the spirit even of veteran soldiers. Now, I want your help in earnest. If we can keep the men at work for six days more, we shall have a chance, at least, ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston

... regiments such as he had seen leaving the stations of Paris. . . . But with what a very different aspect! The blue cloaks were now ragged and yellowing garments, the trousers faded to the color of a half-baked brick, the shoes great cakes of mud. The faces had a desperate expression, with layers of dust and sweat in all their grooves and openings, with beards of recent growth, sharp as spikes, with an air of great weariness showing the longing to drop down somewhere forever, killing ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... time I had a half-baked idea that maybe I wasn't called on to block his little game, but when he begins to rub it into Sadie I sours on Doc right away. And it always does take one or two good punches to warm me up to a scrap. I begins to ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford

... other thoughts came to her. "Plutocracy," she said, "is perfectly detestable, don't you think so, Mr. Brumley?" ... And then, "I can't imagine how a man who deals in bread and confectionery can manage to go about so completely half-baked." ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... second move. A new interne had come into the house, and was going through the process of learning that from a senior at the medical school to a half-baked junior interne is a long step back. He had to endure the good-humored contempt of the older men, the patronizing instructions of nurses as ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... you are, Builder thought. Manipulating this image of Thor you talk about, so that it will take the blood offerings of the people and even you and that half-baked discipline of yours, Morge. I must look at your god Thor one of ...
— Regeneration • Charles Dye

... twopence a syllable, etc. It is all a mystery; and the more I try to express my meaning (having none that is clear), the more I flounder. Finally, write what your own conscience, which to you is the unerring judge, deems best, and be careless about the whimsies of such a half-baked notionist as I am. We are here in a most pleasant country, full of walks, and idle to our heart's desire. Taylor has dropped the "London." It was indeed a dead weight. It had got in the Slough of Despond. I shuffle off my part of ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb

... longer played, the half-laden bees had gone to sleep among the blossoms of the apple-trees, and the flowers themselves had forgotten to open their petals to the sun. In the kitchen the cook was dozing over the half-baked meats in front of the smouldering fire; the butler was snoring in the pantry; the dairy-maid was quietly napping among the milk-pans; and even the house-flies had gone to sleep over the crumbs of sugar ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin

... now they have done with them! Less or more, have we not all thus taken our journey into a far country? But many a man of sixty is more of a son to the father gone from the earth, than he was while under his roof. What a disintegrated mass were the world, what a lump of half-baked brick, if death were indeed the end of affection! if there were no chance more of setting right what was so wrong in the loveliest relations! How gladly would many a son who once thought it a weariness to serve his parents, minister now to their ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald

... his stablemen; but a gardener, and a tenth-down under-gardener at that; in fact, you could scarcely call him even an under-gardener, though he did odd jobs about the gardens. To be short, it was Tommy Collins a hydrocephalous youth generally supposed to be half-baked, or, as we put it in Cornwall, 'not exactly'; and on his immense head, crowning a livery suit which patently did not belong to him, Tommy Collins wore a ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... they had gotten. Some did it without grinding it, by reason of the extremity of the want they were in, and others baked bread of it, according as necessity and fear dictated to them. A table was nowhere laid for a distinct meal, but they snatched the bread out of the fire, half-baked, and ate it ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various

... bacon in an open skillet and the bubbling of coffee over a bed of coals with the mysterious darkness of the timber gathering in about him. He loaded his pipe after his chopping, and sat watching Olaf as he mothered the half-baked bannock loaf. It made him think of his father. A thousand times the two must have camped like this in the days when Alaska was new and there were no maps to tell them what lay ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood

... rounded bases of the bowls and dishes used. The gourd forms of bowls possibly originated from the clay being moulded over gourds which were burnt out in the baking process. It is said that in the Southern States the kilns in which the ancient pottery was baked have been found, and in some the half-baked ware remained, retaining the rinds of the gourds over which they had been moulded. Afterwards, when the potter learned to make bowls without the aid of gourds, he still retained the shape of his ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt

... That was the essential thing. And my legal experience had taught me that victory counts; defeat is soon forgotten. Even the discontented, half-baked and heterogeneous element from which the Pilot got its ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... "upstage Eastern manner." Most of them are graduates of the newspaper school, and remnants of newspaper cynicism occasionally appear in their outspoken philosophy. But be not deceived by this, for even in the newspaper office the half-baked cub who is getting his first glimpses of woman's frailties and man's weak will is the only cynic who means all he says. All reporters who are worth their salt mellow with the years; and editors who amount to much usually are ex-reporters trained to their jobs by long experience. ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing

... isn't building bridges over boiling chasms three thousand feet below in the Andes river bottoms; it isn't leading ragged armies of half-baked South American natives against a mud stockade; it isn't shooting African animals and dining on quinine and hippopotamus liver. No, there's none of the soldier of fortune business about it. But vital! My heavens! what do you ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble

... said, he'd give Hart such a character he didn't know him himself; and he'd touched up Palomitas till he'd got it so it might a-been a town just outside Boston—only he allowed they was sometimes troubled with hard cases passing through; and he told her of course she'd find things kind of half-baked and noisy out there on the frontier. And she must remember, he told her, that all the folks in the town was young—young men who'd brought their young wives with 'em, come to hustle in a new country—and she mustn't mind if things went livelier'n the ...
— Santa Fe's Partner - Being Some Memorials of Events in a New-Mexican Track-end Town • Thomas A. Janvier

... been able to hold those boys from Mechanicsburg, who were reckoned only "half-baked" players, as some of the Scranton fans called it, what sort of a chance would Frazer have against the Champs, who had toyed with Belleville just a week back, and looked tremendously dangerous as they practiced now upon the local field, so as ...
— The Chums of Scranton High Out for the Pennant • Donald Ferguson

... and labor showed plainly in the reception of the news. Capital berated Bonbright; labor was inclined to fulsomeness. Capital called him on the telephone to remonstrate and to state its opinion of him as a half-baked idiot of a young idealist who was upsetting business. Labor put on its hat and stormed the gates of Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, seeking for five-dollar jobs. Not hundreds of them came, but thousands. The streets were blocked with applicants, every one eager for that minimum ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland

... those; and I won't give you any trouble, either.... I reckon," mused the adventurer, jingling his manacles thoughtfully, "I'm a back-number, anyway. When a half-grown girl, a half-baked boy, a flub like Mulready—damn his eyes!—and a club-footed snipe from Scotland Yard can put it all over me this way,... why, I guess it's up to me to go home and retire to my country-place up the ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance

... is accidental or incidental, and not a matter of heredity. Once a mother gets imbued with the notion that the condition is hereditary, she falls into agonies of fear for her other children. In my mind there is a thoroughly reprehensible publicity given to half-baked work in heredity, mental hygiene, and the like that does far more harm than good and interferes ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson

... as they went the stories were true. Mr. Toscanini, as all the world knows by now, is the world's No. 1 musical purist. Nothing but perfection satisfies him. He hates compromise, loathes the half-baked and mediocre, refuses to put up with "something almost ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower

... shall be evoked As will to leeward cause a state of coma And leave the enemy blind and choked; By gifts of culture we will work such ravages With our superbly patriotic smells As would confound with shame those half-baked ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... till the effigy of the deceased has been made and a feast given in his honour, they are obliged to remain in the house without going out for any purpose, not even to bathe or to fetch food and drink. Moreover they must abstain from the ordinary articles of diet and confine themselves to half-baked cakes of sago and other unpalatable viands. As these restrictions may last for months they are not only irksome but onerous, especially to people who have no slaves to fetch and carry for them. However, in that case the neighbours come to the rescue and supply the mourners with ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... and learn if Justin O'Reilly was in; but now she determined not to do so. Better waste a little time rather than Peterson should hear her inquiring for O'Reilly. Instead of waiting to telephone, she walked to the door and asked a half-baked youth in hotel livery ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... of his thoughts. He talked aeroplaning without cessation, directing most of his conversation to Booth, yet thrilled with pleasure each time Hetty laughed at his sallies. He was beginning to feel like a half-baked schoolboy in her presence, a most deplorable state of affairs he ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon

... supplied with the diet so dear to his inmost soul? Was it not a thing to weep over, that a man so keenly alive to every picturesque influence, so anxious to invest his work with the enchanted haze of romantic association, should be confined till middle age amongst the bleak granite rocks and the half-baked civilisation of New England? 'Among ourselves,' he laments, 'there is no fairy land for the romancer.' What if he had been brought up in the native home of the fairies—if there had been thrown open to him the gates through which Shakespeare and Spenser caught their ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... long before morn; Somebody's darling went tattered and torn; Somebody's darling longed for a bite, Half-baked by day and frozen by night. Somebody's darling received Mails sometimes, And his joy was beyond my ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross

... displayed by the Upper Canadian minority, in 1838-39 (vide p. 101), in threatening to leave the Empire rather than submit to Home Rule, and by the Transvaal minority in the lukewarm and divided support given to the half-baked Constitution of 1905, and in the hearty welcome given to the full autonomy of 1906. How the Colonists expressed themselves matters nothing. We must make generous allowance for hot party feeling and old prejudices. The Canadian minorities did not really ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers

... any slave, nor do they deserve to be, for their intelligence is less. The term "sand-hiller," or "clay-eater," is a terrible one of reproach, and is applied unsparingly by the aristocrats. Of course, our entertainment here was composed of rather rude fare, but we ate the half-ground and half-baked corn bread, with the strong pork, and went ...
— Daring and Suffering: - A History of the Great Railroad Adventure • William Pittenger

... never set foot on American soil. Then there is the printing press. It isn't American, either, though somehow we manage to get along with it as well as the other 'foreign importations' mentioned." Of course this smart kind of argument gets nowhere. It is, in fact, intended to appeal to the half-baked type of mind which has only begun to think and has never progressed beyond the point of a consequent mental indigestion that would account for its Socialist nightmare. What the Socialists do know and are not honest ...
— Socialism and American ideals • William Starr Myers

... based on false assumptions; theory which ignores essentials and magnifies trifles; theory which, applied to structures which have failed from their own weight, shows them to be perfectly safe and correct in design; half-baked theories which arrogate to ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey

... suspicions, like you, Hal, upon the strength of my right to my father's titles and estate; as if, with the tithe of the Nettlewood property alone, I would not be too good a match for one of his beggarly family. He must scheme, forsooth, this half-baked Scotch cake!—He must hold off and on, and be cautious, and wait the result, and try conclusions with me, this lump of oatmeal dough!—I am much tempted to make an example of him in the course ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott

... you think for a moment he'd stand it, like that half-baked clergyman in the play? ...
— How He Lied to Her Husband • George Bernard Shaw

... Gods" was doubtless applied because of the peculiar shape of the spires, needles, and basilicas of rock that rise in every direction. These have been corroded by storms and worn smooth by time, until they present the appearance of half-baked images of clay molded by human hands, instead of sandstone rocks fashioned by wind and weather. Each grotesque and fantastic shape has received a name. One is here introduced to the "Washerwoman," the "Lady of the Garden," the "Siamese ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore

... you came here. You see, it was all right before, when your plans weren't formed. Now it means not only his sliding back, but yours too. You know as well as I do that a half-baked man isn't worth a whoop, not a solitary whoop. You've got to drop down into mediocrity just when you are on the way up to something. And after sacrificing yourself, perhaps, it will have been for nothing. ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field

... movement is there here? Manifestoes! And what recruits have they made? Sub-lieutenants in brain fever and two or three students! You are a sensible man: answer this question. Why don't people of consequence join their ranks? Why are they all students and half-baked boys of twenty-two? And not many of those. I dare say there are thousands of bloodhounds on their track, but have they tracked out many of them I Seven! I tell you it makes ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... union under Prussia and Prussian kings. Frederick the Great deserves this particular encomium; for as Luther freed Germany, and all Christendom indeed, from the tyranny of tradition, as Lessing freed us from the tyranny of the letter, from the second-hand and half-baked Hellenism of a Racine and a Corneille, so Frederick the Great freed his countrymen at last from the puerile slavery to French fashions and traditions, which had made them self- conscious at home and ridiculous abroad. ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier



Words linked to "Half-baked" :   raw, crazy, impractical, screwball, colloquialism, softheaded, underdone



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