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Light-handed   Listen
adjective
Light-handed  adj.  
1.
(Naut.) Not having a full complement of men; as, a vessel light-handed.
2.
Having a metaphorically delicate touch. Antonym: heavy-handed. "the translation is... light-handed... and generally unobtrusive."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Light-handed" Quotes from Famous Books



... its petty feuds, its gentilities, its chances and changes of fortune. The influence of Jane Austen's stories is seen in every chapter; but Harriet Martineau had none of the easy flow, the pleasant humour, the light-handed irony of her model, any more than she had the energetic and sustained imaginative power of Charlotte or Emily Bronte. There is playfulness enough in Deerbrook, but it is too deliberate to remind us of the crooning involuntary ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 6: Harriet Martineau • John Morley

... be more charming than the manner in which the soft, bright, active presence of Phoebe Pyncheon is indicated, or than the account of her relations with the poor dimly sentient kinsman for whom her light-handed sisterly offices, in the evening of a melancholy life, are a revelation of lost possibilities of happiness. "In her aspect," Hawthorne says of the young girl, "there was a familiar gladness, and a holiness that ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.

... Then they all went on to Nanheim without relapse. There, after a few days, Adams left him for the regular treatment, and came up to Paris. The medical reports promised well, and Hay's letters were as humorous and light-handed as ever. To the last he wrote cheerfully of his progress, and amusingly with his usual light scepticism, of his various doctors; but when the treatment ended, three weeks later, and he came on to Paris, he showed, at the first glance, that ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams

... footstool in the library, facing the Major and a couple of the Major's cronies. His face wore an expression in which there was more resentment than resignation; for, though he took blows doggedly, he bore the memory of them long after the smart had ceased—long, indeed, after light-handed justice, in the Major's person, had forgotten alike the sin and the expiation. For the Major's hand was not steady at the rod, and he had often regretted a weakness of heart which interfered with a physical interpretation of the ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow



Words linked to "Light-handed" :   delicate



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