"Slipshod" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... small, and 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, though indicative ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... to the letter, and it is the attempt to 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 for trade in ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead—who does not know them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design? They are as familiar as the cortege of the undertaker, and bear the same air of slow, ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... before I began to understand her. I soon began to learn that, first of all, she wanted everything kept clean about her, that she wanted things done promptly and systematically, and that at the bottom of everything she wanted absolute honesty and frankness. Nothing must be sloven or slipshod; every door, every fence, ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... 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
... days, and have talked more or less ever since, about the Oriel style. Perhaps the best example of it is Church, the accomplished Dean of St. Paul's. Church does not rival Newman and Froude at their best. But he never, as they sometimes do, falls into loose and slipshod writing. He was the fine flower of the old Oxford education, growing in hedged gardens, sheltered from the winds of heaven, such as Catullus painted in everlasting colours long centuries ago. Froude was a man of the world, who knew the classics, and the minds of men, and cities, and ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... 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 a ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... clause in the royal decree of November 19, 1627 (which see, post); and it would seem that the date here given, June 14, must be an error for that just cited. This and the following matter from the Recopilacion show clearly the slipshod manner in ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XXII, 1625-29 • Various
... his recitation forming a very favorable contrast to the slipshod attempt of John. This John, in a spirit of unreasonableness, magnified into a grave offense, and a desire to "show off" at ...
— Frank's Campaign - or the Farm and the Camp • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... the general recommendation of doing everything you do as it ought to be done. There should be no slipshod way of writing a letter by which you are to ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... coast being clear, the girl gave a sudden scud across, and into the swing. She began to scuff with her slipshod, twisted shoes, ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... metre, leaden pun, For slipshod rhyme, and lazy word, Have pity on this graceless one— Thy mercy ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... 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 ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... much those slipshod lines Dr. Johnson wrote to Thrale, telling her about life's declining from THIRTY-FIVE; the furnace is in full blast for ten years longer, as I have said. The Romans came very near the mark; their age of enlistment reached from ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Herring and Sherlock, Doddridge and Chandler, had seen their plans extensively advocated, and carried triumphantly through Parliament, the result would in all probability have been a disappointing one. It would infallibly have been a slipshod comprehension. Carelessness and indifference would have had a large share in promoting it; relaxation, greater than even then existed, of the order of the Church, would have been a likely consequence. The National Church was not in a sufficiently healthy and vigorous condition to conduct with ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... she had begun to feel loathing and disgust. He was now two-and-forty, he drank too much, he ate too much, he smoked too much. He was growing corpulent and scant of breath, with hanging lips and heavy eyelids; he no longer took care of his person as formerly, but went about slipshod, and indulged in the coarsest pleasantries. But it was more particularly away from his home that he sank into degradation, indulging in the low debauchery which had ever attracted him. Every now and again he disappeared ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... 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, talking along. ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... ribbons, from which freely protruded the mountainous masses of her bosom. On her head was a toque of checked "bandana," folded over the black corkscrew ringlets, that scarce reached so low as her ears; while ungartered stockings upon her ankles, and slipshod shoes upon her feet, completed the tout ensemble of her costume. Notwithstanding the neglige visible in her apparel, there were signs of conceit as to personal appearance. The fashion and trimmings were ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... terrific 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 heart for ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... composed of carriers, waiters, messengers, etc., pass quietly and without any noise: they are generally seen with the Chinese umbrella, painted in many colors, screening themselves from the sun. The whole population wear slippers, and move along with a slipshod gait. ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... frame of 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 ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 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 ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... nobler and more sensible than that! Even his earliest poetry has in it no false, slipshod sentiment. Its subject is nature and heroic incident, and is indeed a faithful attempt to carry out the aim so well stated above. Some have doubted whether Bayard Taylor really had the power which he says he thinks is given to all who have ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... of popular fury, is to render a service to the Republic. But for the courts to arrogate to themselves functions which properly belong to the legislative bodies is all wrong, and in the end works mischief. The people should not be permitted to pardon evil and slipshod legislation on the theory that the court will set it right; they should be taught that the right way to get rid of a bad law is to have the legislature repeal it, and not to have the courts by ingenious hair-splitting nullify it. A law may be unwise and improper; ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... 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 no example of any series of ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... "Co." is written it is not an abbreviation of "Coves"—has been reading Sir George (BENTLEY), a Novel, which Mrs. HENNIKER has the courage to put forth in one volume. At the outset, the writing is a little slipshod. Mrs. HENNIKER has, moreover, a wild passion for the conjunction. When she can't summon another "which," she sticks in a "that." On one page appears the following startling announcement—"The March winds this year ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 23, 1891 • Various
... hardly here and there an hackney coach Appearing, showed the ruddy morn's approach. Now Betty from her master's bed had flown, And softly stole to discompose her own. The slipshod 'prentice from his master's door, Had pared the street, and sprinkled round the floor. Now Moll had whirled her mop with dext'rous airs, Prepared to scrub the entry and the stairs. The youth with ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... scene, and went into an obscure part of the town, where Scrooge had never penetrated before, although he recognised its situation and its bad repute. The ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched; the people half naked, drunken, slipshod, ugly. Alleys and archways, like so many cesspools, disgorged their offences of smell, and dirt, and life upon the straggling streets; and the whole quarter reeked with crime, ...
— A Christmas Carol • Charles Dickens
... in the course of 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 ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... an ampler part. For the literature of the past Page had great respect, but his interest was ever in the present and the future. He was forever fulminating against bad writing, and hated the ignorant and slipshod work of the hack almost as much as he despised the sham of the man who affected letters, the dabbler and the poetaster. His taste was for the roast beef of literature, not for the side dishes and the trimmings, and his ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... 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 ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... before anybody came. When at last they did he heard them coming for a long time before the door was opened, heard slipshod steps on shiny linoleum, and a ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... of the brief space of time within which they were carried out, the majority of these works betray no signs of haste or slipshod execution; the craftsmen employed on them seem to have preserved in their full integrity all the artistic traditions of earlier times, and were capable of producing masterpieces which will bear comparison with those of the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... 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, etc. It became an extempore performance, and every set of keepers varied the melody according to ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth
... step the owner of the letter followed a slipshod and marvellously unwashed waiter into No. 4,—a small square asylum for town travellers, country yeomen, and "single gentlemen;" presenting, on the one side, an admirable engraving of the Marquis of Granby, and on the other an equally ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... almost like a part of her horse. Both girls rode astride, wearing long holland coats and specially made light top-boots, with large shady sun helmets; and because for a long time he had not seen anything much but slipshod garments among women riders, or exceedingly warm-looking correct home attire, he ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... first dawned on him that, in the awful deterioration of Granville and the Baby, the standard of her own toilette had gradually lowered. Then gradually he got inured to it. The tousled, tumbling hair, the slipshod feet, the soiled blouse gaping at the back, were, he reflected bitterly, in perfect harmony with Granville, and of a piece with everything. He had ceased to censure them; they belonged so inalienably ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... Perkins' life. The Duchess had sent him a three-page wire in the hyperbolical style of her class, conveying a vague impression that she and the Duke had arranged to commit suicide together if Perkins didn't "chuck" any previous engagement he had made. And Perkins had felt in a slipshod sort of way—for at this period he was incapable of ordered thought—he might as well be ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... attendant wigs are all stuck in a fog-bank! This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man's acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... had been taken off, and replaced by a pair of slipshod slippers; his splashed white kerseymere pantaloons, seamed with gold, resting on the unfrayed velvet cushion; his blue coat, covered with rich embroidery at the bosom and collar, was open, and the ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... able to demonstrate that the man with a diploma has learned to use the tools of life skilfully; has learned how to focus his faculties so that he can bring the whole man to his task, and not a part of himself. Low ideals, slipshod work, aimless, systemless, half-hearted endeavors, should have no place in ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... caught. He saw himself punished for that intellectual sloth which leads adults to fob children off with any kind of a slipshod, dishonestly simplified explanation of phenomena whose adequate explanation presents difficulty. He remembered how nearly twenty years earlier he had puzzled over the same question and for a long time had ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... retreats That hold thee, smothered with excess of sweets, Shade of a shadow, spectre of a dream, Glance thy wan eye across the Stygian stream! The slipshod dreamer treads thy fragrant halls, The sophist's cobwebs hang thy roseate walls, And o'er the crotchets of thy jingling tunes The bard of mystery scrawls his crooked "runes." Yes, thou art gone, with all the tuneful ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... went rattling out of sight, like spectres' chains; the hook-nosed antiquary drew in his cracked old show-case; the greasy frier of fish and artichokes extinguished his little charcoal fire of coals; the slipshod darning-women, half-blind with six days' work, folded the half-patched coats and trousers, and took their rickety old rush-bottomed chairs ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... parlor a tramp happened to pass the brightly lighted shop. He was weather-beaten and slipshod, and altogether made a most disreputable appearance. A hand was thrust into each of his pockets, and these pockets were destitute of coin. The tramp was hungry and penniless. The little shop with its gay ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... degree, of grace. A student without training will usually stand with his head protruding forward, his shoulders drooping, his body twisted, and his feet far apart, with all his weight on one leg. Such an attitude is enough to condemn one even before he begins to speak. A slipshod appearance suggests slipshod thinking and reasoning. A speaker should always stand erect, with his head back, chin in, shoulders rolled back and down; either the feet should be near together with the weight of the body on both, or one foot should be slightly in advance of the other with the ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... muddle and confusion and slipshod thinking there arose one man with a purpose, one man who fixed his eyes on a single inevitable goal and walked straight at it, not minding what or whom he trod upon on the way. His purpose was ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... critic Winstanley may seem devoid of taste, but his acquaintance with English poetry is impressive. Indeed, Winstanley, unlike Phillips, strikes us as a man who really read and enjoyed poetry. Phillips is more the slipshod bibliographer and cataloguer, collecting names and titles; Winstanley is the amateur literary historian, seeking out the verse itself, arranging it in chronological order, and trying, by his dim lights, to pass judgment ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley
... for the Irish priest on the foreign mission. It is well he should be under no delusion. In Ireland a slipshod or unprepared sermon may meet with indulgent charity. A very different reception awaits it abroad. The priest who attempts it will quickly discover how he is set up for a sign that shall be contradicted. The free, white light of open criticism penetrates ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... 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 ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... abrupt, he gave an impression of volcanic force, and at the same time of great keenness. A scientist of remarkable discernment, he possessed with all his broad views a marvelous capacity for detail, and Colin soon learned that the somewhat slipshod methods of a college laboratory would not ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... 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; her children loved her, and her husband ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... 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
... fisherman or weaver of tent-cloth who brought forth the declarations of the comforter of Hezekiah, the captive prophet and the priest in the land of the Chaldeans. His was no barbarous manner or slipshod tongue of the market-place and the wheat-fields, but the polish and the clean-cut flawless language of the synagogues and the colleges. Laodice saw in the gesture and phrase the refinement of her father, Costobarus, of ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... 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 margin when he came to print. ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... to Singapore there was something novel and 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 no uncommon thing to see Malays wait at table, yet in ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser
... 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 Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... 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 me a musical-box and a spy-glass, asking many questions. ...
— General Gordon - Saint and Soldier • J. Wardle
... nation's estates. He possessed a methodical mind, a rather intolerant disposition, thick glasses, a very cold and precise manner, extreme personal neatness, and abysmal ignorance of the West. He disapproved of California John's rather slipshod dress, to start with; his ingrained reticence shrank from Davidson's informal cordiality; his orderly mind recoiled with horror from the jumble of the Supervisor's accounts and reports. As he knew nothing whatever ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... are, of course, different, but as they both converge to the same point, namely, to the reform of our system of war finance, it is possible that they may in time have the effect of shaking even the confidence of our politicians and officials in the haphazard and slipshod methods which would long ago have produced financial disaster if it had not been for the great financial strength ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... the working-men had not yet turned out; at the morning coffee-rooms the shutters were just being taken down; warmly- clad tram-men were tramping through the streets in their wooden-soled boots; slipshod, tired women ran stumbling along to their early jobs, shivering with cold and weary of life, weary before they had begun their day. Here and there a belated woman toiled along the street carrying a clothes-basket, ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... sure. I used to think so, but I'm beginning to have my doubts about it. One comforts the whole world in a slipshod, sketchy kind of way; but one could do the ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... within a year or two, and been nearly spoiled for any condition of life. She is a kind of attendant and companion of the fair Julia's; and from loitering about the young lady's apartments, reading scraps of novels, and inheriting second-hand finery, has become something between a waiting-maid and a slipshod fine lady. ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... satisfaction of encouragement or confirmation. She owed to others only the powerful stimulus which the Revolution gave to all bold and progressive thought. The vitality of her ideas sprang from her own experience. She had received rather less than was customary of the slipshod superficial education permitted to girls of the middle classes in her day. With this nearly useless equipment, she had found herself compelled to struggle with the world not merely to gain a living, but to rescue a luckless family from a load of embarrassments ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... 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 at the ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... "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 ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... was upon the student fraction of his congregation that Brenton looked with greatest interest; it was to them, in greatest measure, that the best of his sermons preached themselves. The phrase is no slipshod inversion of the fact. The best of all sermons do preach themselves, both in their original inception and their ultimate delivery. All the so-called preacher does about it is to give the intermediate polishing to his projectile, ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... astoundingly noiseless, though situated in what had once been the heart of Paris. It was one of the few houses left in this quarter with a large garden. And the traffic passing in and out of the Ruelle St. Jacob went slipshod on its own feet. The busy crackle of the wood was the only sound to break a silence which seemed part of ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... said Ans one 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 ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... specimen of the slipshod housekeeper as ever piled away breakfast dishes unwashed, or swept dirt under a settee. If they had money she bought things they did not need, and if there was no money she borrowed provisions and forgot to return the loan. Irregularity of living, deprivation and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... saw boys, 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 ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... 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 ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... obstacles; and he was further advanced, and his knowledge was more thorough than that of any other boy of the same age in the village. He never gave up any thing he undertook because he found it more difficult than he had expected, or hurried over it in a "slipshod" manner, for his motto was, "Whatever is worth doing at ...
— Frank, the Young Naturalist • Harry Castlemon
... selected twenty-six cases very dubious. In one case is a possible margin of four days, another (wrongly numbered by the way) does not occur at all among the twenty-six. In the third, Herr Parish is wrong in his statement.[4] This is a lovely example of the sceptical slipshod, and, accompanied by the miscitation of the second case, shows that inexactitude is not all on the side of the seers. However the case is not very good, the two percipients fancying that the date of the event ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... 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 stuff, and songs about wanting to go back to every ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... 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, ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... very accurate mind. He can't bear anything slipshod in the way of a statement. Now, you are sure, after your walk, you do not feel the fire too much? Then move into this chair. You have really taken the least comfortable in the room. Now, isn't ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... know, at all events, that Sylla formed a right estimate of Csar's character, and that, from the complexion of his conduct in this one instance, he drew his famous prophecy of his future destiny; bidding his friends beware of that slipshod boy, "for that in him lay couchant many a Marius." A grander testimony to the awe which Csar inspired, or from one who knew better the qualities of that man by whom he ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... Garcias. No man who has endeavored to carry out an enterprise where many hands were needed, but has been well-nigh appalled at times by the imbecility of the average man—the inability or unwillingness to concentrate on a thing and do it. Slipshod assistance, foolish inattention, dowdy indifference, and half-hearted work seem the rule; and no man succeeds, unless by hook or crook, or threat, he forces or bribes other men to assist him; or mayhap, God in His goodness performs a miracle, and sends him an angel of light ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... 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
... A slatternly, slipshod girl answered the bell, and having received her orders and the united available funds of the two comrades, speedily returned with a brace of frothing pint pots. The major ruminated silently over his cigarette for some time, on some unpleasant ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to 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
... 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 here on ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... fields was a different matter. Though on them the traditional rotation of crops was stupid and the husbandry slipshod, yet the semi-communal tillage of the three open strips enabled Hodge to jog along in the easy ways dear to him. In such cases a change to more costly methods involves hardship to the poor, who cannot, ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... those of the best-managed industrial corporations. He may even have appeared to be over-insistent upon business accuracy, system, and efficiency, so anxious was he to belie the popular notion that Negroes must of necessity, because they are Negroes, be slipshod and unsystematic. In refutation of this familiar accusation he built up an institution almost as large as Harvard University which runs like clockwork without a single white man or woman having any part in its actual ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... cannot be done in slipshod, haphazard manner. The system's need for radioactives ...
— Medal of Honor • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... 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 ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... 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 ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... correctly and vigorously. We are apt in England to class as an "Americanism" every unfamiliar, or too familiar, locution which we do not happen to like. As a matter of fact, there is a pretty lively interchange between the two countries of slipshod and vulgar "journalese;" and as the picturesque reporter is a greater power in America than he is with us, we perhaps import more than we export of this particular commodity. But there can be no rational ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... intermediate 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 ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... consumption bacilli. But I won't use it to-morrow; we have Miss Cissy Levine's tale. It's not half bad. What a pity she has the expenses of her books paid! If she had to achieve publication by merit, her style might be less slipshod." ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Louise removed herself from the scene of her defeat and stood in the doorway of the tea room proper and stared bleakly across a vista of deserted tables at a languid and heat-ridden thoroughfare. It was going to be a "hit-or-miss" proposition, a careless, slipshod affair—this tea room—unless she did something to prevent it—and it was too hot. That was what was the matter. It was too hot. She brushed back the hair from her face and slumped. Behind her came the clatter ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... 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
... snoring,[34174] some stretched out on the benches and others leaning on the tables with their elbows, some were barefoot others were wearing their shoes slipshod like slippers; almost all were dirty and poorly clad; their clothes were unbuttoned, their hair uncombed, and their faces frightful; they wore pistols in their belts, and sabers, with scarves turned into shoulder-straps. Bottles, bits of bread, fragments of meat ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the less he issued from that severe course of study a changed man, one who knew the difference between the learned lawyer and the unlearned. His own methods, to be sure, remained what they always continued to be, unsystematic, not to say slipshod. Even after he became president his lack of system was at times the despair of his secretaries.(6) Herndon, who succeeded Logan as his partner, and who admired both men, has a broad hint that Logan and Lincoln were not always an harmonious firm. A clash of political ambitions is part explanation; ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... "members for India" with a vigour and acumen which deprived them of speech. The East, he said, had had its revenge upon the West by making certain Englishmen babus. His honourable friends had the same slipshod minds, and they talked the same pigeon-English, as the patriots of Bengal. Then his mood changed, and he delivered a solemn warning against what he called "the treason begotten of restless vanity and proved incompetence." He sat down, leaving a House deeply impressed and ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... foot. Mr. Greg always showed the highest conception of the functions and the obligations of the writer who addresses the public, in however ephemeral a form, on topics of social importance. No article of his ever showed a trace either of slipshod writing or of make-believe and perfunctory thinking. To compose between four and five hundred pages like these, on a variety of grave subjects, all needing to be carefully prepared and systematically thought out, was no inconsiderable piece of work for a single pen. The strain was ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... one of the best examples of Shakespeare's contempt for stagecraft. Not only is the mechanism of the play, as we shall see later, astonishingly slipshod, but the ostensible purpose of the play, which is to make the laws respected in Vienna, is not only not attained, but seems at the end to be rather despised than forgotten. This indifference to logical consistency ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... away with alacrity. Marian put off her bonnet and furs, and sat down before the fire to despond over the prospect of living in that shabby room, waited on by that slipshod Irish girl, who roused in her something very like racial antipathy. Presently Eliza returned, carrying a small tray, upon which she had crowded a lighted kerosene lamp, a china tea service, a rolled-up table cloth, a supply of bread and butter, and a copper kettle. When ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... yawning gyp comes slipshod in, To wake his master ere the bells begin. The College, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... "Gwanny Mawwowbone!" This was very articulately delivered, the previous, or slipshod, pronunciation having been more ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... 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. The average annual cost ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... had answered his own thoughts, not her words. He finished his breakfast quickly, and very soon went out. He crossed the Square, and passed East, down two crowded streets to his church. In the traffic of those streets, all slipshod and confused, his black-clothed figure and grave face, with its Vandyk beard, had a curious remote appearance, like a moving remnant of a past civilisation. He went in by the side door. Only five days he had been away, but they had been so full of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... see what was underneath it and was lost in the contemplation of a huge pumpkin. She wanted to go along every single garden walk and to take immediate possession of all the things she had been wont to dream of in the old days, when she was a slipshod work-girl on the Paris pavements. The rain redoubled, but she never heeded it and was only miserable at the thought that the daylight was fading. She could not see clearly now and touched things ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... task as against ordinary piece work lies in the fact that the success of a good workman or the failure of a poor one is thereby daily and prominently called to the attention of the management. Many a poor workman might be willing to go along in a slipshod way under ordinary piece work, careless as to whether he fell off a little in his output or not. Very few of them, however, would be willing to record a daily failure to accomplish their task even if they were allowed to do so by their foreman; and also since on ordinary ...
— Shop Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor
... afford to do 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 Divine. What the world does ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... 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 into a ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... He wandered slipshod through the street, His clothes had many a rent; His shoes seemed dropping from his feet, His eyes were downward bent. His face was sallow, pale and thin, His beard neglected grew, Upon his once close shaven chin, Like bristles ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... watery blue 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 ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... feasible is that in which, by a slipshod extension, it is allowed to have also the other sense of possible, and that of probable. This is described by the highest authority as "hardly a justifiable sense etymologically, and ... recognized by no dictionary". It is however ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... she meant. Manning's little push for power was nothing new or shocking in Terran frontier politics. With the rapid expansion of the Edge through the centuries, the frontier policy of the Confederation had had to adapt itself to comparatively slipshod methods of setting up governments in the newly-opened areas. Back in the early days they'd tried sending out trained men from each Cluster headquarters, but that had been foredoomed to failure: travel between ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr
... closing the book, "is no caricature by a writer of comedy, but a portrait by a man's own hand. We can see by it how easily, under certain circumstances, one may glide into habits of seclusion, and in a kind of undress, slipshod hardihood, with a pipe and a proof-sheet, defy the world. Into this state scholars have too often fallen; thus giving some ground for the prevalent opinion, that scholarship and rusticity are inseparable. To me, I confess, it is painful to see the scholar and ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... character, for there is no attempt at any but the crudest character-drawing. It is just a six-shilling novel, and I do not see what else one can say of it. Mr. JEPSON must do one of two things. He must either brace up and make his style less irritatingly slipshod, or he must give us a few more murders. If we cannot have literary elegance he must give ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 5, 1916 • Various
... walking characterizes some. 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 ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... a place where there isn't any Meetin Houses and where preachers is never seen, and I'll show you a place where old hats air stuffed into broken winders, where the children air dirty and ragged, where gates have no hinges, where the wimin are slipshod, and where maps of the devil's "wild land" air painted upon men's shirt bosums with tobacco-jooce! That's what I'll show you. Let us consider what the preachers do for us ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... and without a word of remonstrance, he obeyed. The whole interior was dingy and dirty. Mrs. Tucker was not a neat woman, and everything looked neglected and slipshod. ...
— The Young Musician - or, Fighting His Way • Horatio Alger
... from successful works of art. They have all the incoherence and slipshod workmanship of Dostoevski, without the latter's glow of brotherly love. His first real novel, "Foma Gordeev," an epic of the Volga, has many beautiful descriptive passages, really lyric and idyllic in tone, mingled ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... over the table, and descried a small slipshod girl in a dirty coarse apron and bib, which left nothing of her visible but her face and feet. She might as well have been dressed in ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... 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 ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was not thinking of him at all, but of the cozy evening she 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 far ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... for precise information as to the position in the house that stood here of the very room in which Tasso was born. It is also minutely given in a memoir of Tasso and his family, by Bartolommeo Capasso, whose careful researches have disproved the slipshod statements of the guidebooks, that the poet was born in a house which is still standing, farther to the west, and that the room has fallen into the sea. The descendant of the sister pointed out to me the spot on the terrace of the Tramontano where the room itself was, when the house still ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... grossness that employs the epithet "quaint" to put upon subtlety and the devices of a studied workmanship an imputation of eccentricity; or, if he falls in with the populace in this regard, he will be careful to justify his innuendo. The slipshod use of "nice" to connote any sort of pleasurable emotion he will take care, in his writings at least, utterly to abhor. From the daintiness of elegance to the arrogant disgust of folly the word carries meanings numerous and diverse ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... been already three weeks studying hard with Garcia, who is not only a wonderful teacher, but is a wonderful personality. I simply worship him, though he is very severe and pulls me up directly I "slipshod," as he calls it; and so far I have literally sung nothing but scales. He says that a scale must be like a beautiful row of pearls: each note like a pearl, perfect ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... day and night all the years I was tramping up and down with my old man; but when he died, I had it buried with him to ease his soul. For you see, dear, he was a trooper, and led such a rackety, up-and-down life, that I doubt but his confessions were but slipshod, and he needed all the help be could get, poor old soul! It's a comfort to think he ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... 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 ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London |
