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Slipshod   /slˈɪpʃˌɑd/   Listen
Slipshod

adjective
1.
Marked by great carelessness.  Synonyms: haphazard, slapdash, sloppy.  "Slapdash work" , "Slipshod spelling" , "Sloppy workmanship"






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"Slipshod" Quotes from Famous Books



... record. During the author's slow and finicky composition of 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 ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner

... in gloom I retraced some unattractive steps. This same afternoon I staged back along the sordid, incompetent Gila River, and to kill time pushed my Sproud inquiry, at length with success. To check the inevitably slipshod morals of a frontier commonwealth, Arizona has a statute that in reality only sets in writing a presumption of the common law, the ancient presumption of marriage, which is that when a man and woman go to house-keeping for a certain length of time, they shall be deemed legally married. ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister

... repulsive to me, and when I reflected that a stay of a few years in that forlorn, decaying, reeking city was the goal of political ambition, the whole thing seemed to me utterly worthless. The whole life there bore the impress of the slipshod habits engendered by slavery, and it seemed a civilization rotting before ripeness. The city was certainly, at that time, the most wretched capital in Christendom. Pennsylvania Avenue was a sort ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White

... 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 Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... goal. The veterans on the team, Tucker at left tackle, Graham at center, Cowan at right-guard, Foster at quarter, and Devoe at right end, played well with the glaring exception of Cowan, whose work in the second half especially was so slipshod that Mills, with wrath in his eye, took him out and put in Bell, ...
— Behind the Line • Ralph Henry Barbour

... of this promenade were a number of persons, some in noisy conversation with their acquaintance below, others playing at ball with some adventurous throwers outside, others looking on at the racket-players, or watching the boys as they cried the game. Dirty, slipshod women passed and repassed, on their way to the cooking-house in one corner of the yard; children screamed, and fought, and played together, in another; the tumbling of the skittles, and the shouts of the players, mingled perpetually ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens

... the dire consequences if they wear their hats on the side of their heads or go about with ragged coats or slipshod feet. ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland

... 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 the stars was slow, and too often the governors had ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr

... "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 were unusually biting, and her nervous ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 23, 1891 • Various

... 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 ...
— General Gordon - Saint and Soldier • J. Wardle

... 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

... bleeve in Meetin Houses. Show me 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 ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne

... what lay back of this. He chanced to know Bob's father was reckoned a very stern man, and that he had grown weary of Bob's customary way of forgetting things, or doing them in a slipshod fashion. He even knew that Mr. Jeffries had laid down the law to his son, and promised to punish him severely the next time he ...
— Jack Winters' Gridiron Chums • Mark Overton

... Mawwowbone!" This was very articulately delivered, the previous, or slipshod, pronunciation having been more nearly ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan

... What struck him as peculiar about the steps was that there seemed no particular desire to move stealthily. There was no extreme caution. They moved along in rather a slipshod way and sounded like soft slippers or feet in stockings. There was something clumsy, irresponsible, almost reckless about ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood

... 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

... 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 ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty

... 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 staff, two university professors being ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny

... culprits (and one of these 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 accomplishment ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... 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, no es (ever ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano

... Mr. Slipshod; follow me." And he led the way to an inner room, in the middle of which stood a table, covered with a large ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth

... As soon as the slipshod girl had gone out of the room, he broke the seal and read the brief answer which Emily had ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various

... 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

... 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, or will not, adopt the requirements of ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... 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 and the soft liquid eyes of dark blue, which looked as if they ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes

... set down the tray, you may go, and don't let me see you in that filthy cap again, not fit to be touched with a pair of tongs; and don't go up to Mrs. Newson in that slipshod fashion, don't Betsey; and when you have taken up tea come here, I have an errand for you to go. Shut the door gently. ...
— Emilie the Peacemaker • Mrs. Thomas Geldart

... sight of that singular home. The wasteful and useless extravagance, the want of plates, the profusion of old tapestry in holes, of antique and ungilt lustres, the draughty doors, the constant visits of creditors, the slatternly appearance of the young ladies in slipshod slippers and dressing gowns, put to flight the best intentioned. In truth, it is not everyone who could resign himself to hang up the hammock of an idle woman in his home for the rest ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet

... beyond what Blackwood or the Quarterly could inflict; and also, when I feel I am right, no external praise can give me such a glow as my own solitary reperception and ratification of what is fine. J.S. is perfectly right in regard to 'the slipshod Endymion.' That it is so is no fault of mine. No! though it may sound a little paradoxical, it is as good as I had power to make it by myself. Had I been nervous about its being a perfect piece, and with that view asked advice and trembled over every ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell

... 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 sentiments are well developed ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

... were, from the very bottom of his stomach, through the folds of a Belcher handkerchief, intimating his acquiescence, in a tone nearly as gracious as that with which the drowsy traveller acknowledges the intimation of the slipshod ostler, that it is on the stroke of five, and the horn will sound in a minute. Captain MacTurk by no means considered this ejaculation as expressing a proper estimate of his own trouble and services. "Humph?" he replied; ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott

... that he would 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, ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... 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 a ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley

... Though 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 ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett

... completion, too often—I had almost written always—loses in force and poignancy of main design. Our little air is swamped and dwarfed among hardly relevant orchestration; our little passionate story drowns in a deep sea of descriptive eloquence or slipshod talk. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... chapter, an aerial for receiving does not have to be nearly as well made or put up as one for sending. But this does not mean that you can slipshod the construction and installation of it, for however simple it is, the job must be done right and in this case it is as easy to do it ...
— The Radio Amateur's Hand Book • A. Frederick Collins

... would seem, there was slipshod work within the airline in the making of the change and the failure to expressly notify flight crews. But the allegations of deliberate concealment and a concocted story are another matter. The complaint is that they were never put squarely to the members of the navigation section. The Commissioner ...
— Judgments of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand on Proceedings to Review Aspects of the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Mount Erebus Aircraft Disaster • Sir Owen Woodhouse, R. B. Cooke, Ivor L. M. Richardson, Duncan

... conscious of his paradox. So also he will shun the 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 enough; it must not be cruelly ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh

... it! Think of a sick man in such a place as Saint Martin's Court, listening to the footsteps, and in the midst of pain and weariness obliged, despite himself (as though it were a task he must perform) to detect the child's step from the man's, the slipshod beggar from the booted exquisite, the lounging from the busy, the dull heel of the sauntering outcast from the quick tread of an expectant pleasure-seeker—think of the hum and noise always being ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens

... quondam supporters. He analysed the character of these "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 ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan

... 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 ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves

... curiously enhanced by his attire. Its special peculiarity was an old smoking-jacket, out at the elbows, ragged at the cuffs, and frayed at the silk collar; Hanway had never before seen a man wear a red coat, or such foot-gear as the slipshod embroidered velvet slippers in which he shuffled to a chair and sat down, tilted back, with his hands in the pockets of his gray trousers. To be sure, he could but be grave when testifying before a coroner's jury, but Hanway was hardly prepared for such exuberant cheerfulness as his manner, ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock

... to offer excuses. From the advantage of retrospection, you can say what you want about slipshod detective work. The point remains that I'd covered the area more than cursorily and had ...
— Attrition • Jim Wannamaker

... 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 doubt, ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer

... use of. Sentence elements out of natural order, (Sec.109). Sentences: defined; declarative, interrogative, imperative, exclamatory; essential qualities of; loose, periodic, balanced; simple, complex, compound; length of; slipshod construction of. Sequence of tenses, infinitive; in clauses. Series of words, punctuation of. Set, confused with sit, Glossary. S-form of verb. Shut of, for rid of, Glossary. Sight, for ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood

... 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 seventeen to ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... is often as slipshod as the position of the qualicative; thus you will find upon page 37 that the pioneers "grayed out the channels, and at last paved them with their bones, through which the commerce and enterprise of England has flowed out of all the world." This sentence is quite deplorable; it has ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude

... 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 is characteristic of Shakespeare; ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris

... give it an attentive hearing and zealously assist with careful application, so that something good and fine be brought forth. When I hear two Hollanders carrying on a conversation, it sounds more like children of a village school repeating their penal task, careless, slipshod, unwilling and embarrassed - if only they ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden

... I watched, I noticed a certain slowness—a heaviness in all his movements—together with a listless, slipshod air which, I judged, was very foreign to him; moreover, as he worked, I thought he hung his head lower ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol

... 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 disordered ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... that all men are wrong, and ends by being unjust to 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 else could. Why Raleigh should be accused of helping ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley

... powerfully built, black-bearded, and 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 be accepted ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... divinity. It was no 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 ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller

... ardent Russians to make a merit of this imperfect civilization, and to cultivate hatred for any people whom they clearly saw possessing anything better: hence it came that, just as so many Frenchmen hate Great Britain, and so many in the backward, slipshod regions of our country hate New England, it was quite the fashion among large classes of Russians to hate everything German, and especially ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White

... 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, who in this poem ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd

... 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 ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser

... 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

... You occasionally see a variety of apple grafted on another in which the graft part gives the tree a sort of slipshod appearance. How about the bearing in ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Second Annual Meeting - Ithaca, New York, December 14 and 15, 1911 • Northern Nut Growers Association

... mystified by this manoeuvre and the cessation of firing on our part; and now, while he was ranging up on our port quarter, and so close that one might almost have hove a biscuit on board, all was confusion with him; the hands being busy taking in their canvas in a slipshod, lubberly way that would have disgraced a collier; while the babble of tongues must have been deafening, judging from ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood

... 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

... incendiarism was standing in front of the image, crossing herself and bowing, and repeating the same words over and over again. The deacon's daughter sat on the bedstead, looking before her, with a dull, sleepy face. Khoroshavka was twisting her black, oily, coarse hair round her fingers. The sound of slipshod feet was heard in the passage, and the door opened to let in two convicts, dressed in jackets and grey trousers that did not reach to their ankles. With serious, cross faces they lifted the stinking tub and carried it out of the cell. The women went ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy

... be a mere slip that the translator in one line uses the formal De and in another the familiar du, but the same inconsistency occurs again and again throughout the volume. In itself a trifle, it indicates clearly enough the careless, slipshod manner of work—and an utter lack of a sense of humor, for no one with a spark of humor would use the modern, essentially German De in a Norwegian translation of Shakespeare. If a formal form must be used it should, as a ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud

... the boy for, you brute?' exclaims a slipshod woman, with two flat irons in a little basket. 'Do you think he's your wife, you willin?' 'Go and hang yourself!' replies the gentleman addressed, with a drunken look of savage stupidity, aiming at the ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens

... I wish you weren't so slipshod and colloquial in your English, Barty—Guardsman's English, I suppose—which I have to use, as it's yours; your French is much more educated and correct. You remember dear M. Durosier at the Pension Brossard? he taught you well. You must read, and cultivate a decent English ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier

... right at hand that would compass the knowledge of the world. The Laboratory is quite as complete, for in it is every chemical substance known to man, all labeled, classified and indexed. Seemingly, Edison is the most careless, indifferent and slipshod of men, but the real fact is that such a thorough business general the world has seldom seen. If he wants, say, the "Electrical Review" for March, Eighteen Hundred Ninety-One, he hands a boy a slip of paper and the book ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard

... which had once upon a time aired themselves among the fashionable in Paris, and patched and faded uniforms, mattered but little. They were men; and even the Iroquois were impressed by this fact more than any other. Du Puys and Nicot saw that there was no slipshod work; for while the drilling was at present only for show and to maintain awe, the discipline would prove effective in time of need. Neither of these good soldiers had the faith in the Iroquois which made the Jesuit Fathers so trustful. Who could ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath

... be justified by strict rules of syntax, e.g. "hi qui pueros in ludum mittunt, idem barbatos ... non docebimus?" [19] "When we send our children to school to learn to speak correctly, shall we not also correct bearded men, when they make mistakes?" Slipshod constructions like this occur throughout the treatise on the Latin tongue, though, it is true, they are almost entirely absent from that on husbandry, which is a much more finished work. Obscurity in explaining what the author means, or in describing ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell

... course was to have accepted an unsworn statement from the prisoner; but the coroner always administered oaths when prisoners were willing to take them. The repetition of that jargon with a profane conclusion (for so it seemed, in the slipshod way that it was said), which the coroner called an oath, was a positive pleasure to that official. As Marcus desired to take the oath, the coroner rattled off the unintelligible something, and handed ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton

... wretched devices cost her twenty-eight cents and a half each per diem. Estimating the total of them on the ranch at one hundred, this meant to her a loss of twenty-eight dollars and a half per diem. I used per diem twice to impress the woman. I added that it was pretty slipshod business for a going concern, supposing—sarcastically now—that the Arrowhead was a going concern. Of course, if it were merely a toy for the ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson

... result of modern methods in mathematics is the importance of symbolic logic and of rigid formalism. Mathematicians, under the influence of Weierstrass, have shown in modern times a care for accuracy, and an aversion to slipshod reasoning, such as had not been known among them previously since the time of the Greeks. The great inventions of the seventeenth century—Analytical Geometry and the Infinitesimal Calculus—were so fruitful in new results that mathematicians ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell

... thoughts. The French wit, satirizing vapid fine writing, said that language was given to man to enable him to conceal his thought. There is no more potent instrument for obscuring or concealing thought than the ready-made phrase. Take up many a piece of journalese or other slipshod writing, and note how often the conventional phrase or word slips from under the pen, meaning nothing in particular. The very conventionality disguises from writer and reader the confusion or absolute lack of idea it serves to cloak. Both are lulled by the familiar sound of the set phrase ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark

... 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 a ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... met with general approbation, and the little party returned more cheerily to the parlour, where Horace performed marvellous exploits with the bell-handle, and succeeded, in the incredible time of seven minutes, in bringing up a small slipshod girl, who, after a good deal of staring about her, and a critical survey of the pattern of Mrs Cruden's dress, contrived to gather a general idea of ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed

... was as perfect as could be. He had, in the truest sense, the gift of tongues. Sixteen languages, indeed, he had mastered besides his own. He had, in very truth, a perfect genius for them. And it was no slipshod attainment with him to learn any one of the sixteen; for by the time he had mastered a language he practically knew it inside and out. He loved this study perhaps more than any other, because it gave him a truer insight into Holy Scripture. Many articles ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking

... aesthetic impression. They are all diffuse; they seem to be content to lead a hundred indecisive attacks upon reality at once rather than to persevere and carry a single one to a final issue; they are all multiple, careless, and slipshod—and they are ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry

... 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

... 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 margin when he came to print. "Sejanus" ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson

... verse is to 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 ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc

... perhaps, had barely heard our 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 for five years the needle of literary endeavor in Great Britain has quivered ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... 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

... reason we demand the right of entry. We are exhausting the soil of the South by our slipshod farming on great plantations where we use old-fashioned tools and slave labor. We refuse to study history. Ancient empires tried this system and died. The Carthagenians developed it to perfection and fell before ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon

... Forestry before it had had charge of the 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 of the Sierras, he was quite unable to appreciate the value of trails, ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White

... 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 Life of Froude • Herbert Paul

... 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, must be kept ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington

... sewed up in a leather bag, which I wore 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various

... small slipshod girl made an anxious dash from refuge-island, lost courage, and turned to run back, changed her mind, got ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne

... 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 ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee

... 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, etc. It became an extempore performance, and every set of keepers varied the melody according to ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth

... His motions were slow and lacked energy. Shuddering at the sight, Ellen refused to conjecture. All too soon she would learn what had happened, and all too soon, perhaps, she herself would be in the midst of another fight. She watched the men. They were making a hurried slipshod job of packing food supplies from both cabins. More than once she caught Colter's gray gleam of gaze on her, and she ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey

... some ten or fifteen miles from Murfreesboro in North Carolina, and about twenty-five from the Great Dismal Swamp. Up to Sunday, the twenty-first of August, 1831, there was nothing to distinguish it from any other rural, lethargic, slipshod Virginia neighborhood, with the due allotment of mansion-houses and log-huts, tobacco-fields and "old-fields", horses, dogs, negroes, "poor white folks", so called, and other white folks, poor without being called ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various

... opinions, was the 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 and misfortunes. ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford

... 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 these papers and could ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth

... too. I can't have such slipshod, no-account names for my hands' children. It isn't dignified. It isn't respectful. It's a disgrace to ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson

... all this is, doubtless, to impart valuable information. But while such slipshod writing is singularly uninteresting, it may also be censured as inaccurate. Mr. Abbott seems to think all polygons necessarily regular. Any child can make a heptagon at once, notwithstanding Mr. Abbott calls it so difficult. A regular heptagon, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various

... 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 ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... the sad 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 hordes That candied thoughts in amber-colored ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... how—by no effort of my own will, it seemed to 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 the stairs, "Let ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... 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 ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch

... himself. He was a shrewd, though good-natured critic, had many little secrets of colouring and composition, which an invitation to supper, or the loan of ten shillings, was sufficient to bribe from him. Ragged, out of elbows, unshaven, and slipshod, he still had his set amongst the gay and the young,—a precious master, a profitable set for his nephew, Master Honore Gabriel! But the poor rapscallion had a heart larger than many honest, painstaking men. As soon as Gabriel had found him out, and entreated refuge ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... 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 not linger over them. His virtues are ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... "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

... of retrenchment 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 of perfection. There was no new fashion in Belgravia—from a brand ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon

... 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 ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various

... 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

... 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 get strenuous and zealous work unless you also ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson

... slattern; yet it staggered him when it 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 to the drab monotone; they were ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair

... legal possession of feudal property, or, 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. Spec, The Speculative ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Bladen had eloped, though the 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 gloves, ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson

... those days; alliteration was the only sort of jingle: in the judgment of Mr. Fox and some other Anglo-Saxon critics my version was fairly close, and for the poetical part of my own production at least nothing is of the slipshod order of half rhymes or alternate prose and verse—too common, especially in our hymnology—but honest double rhyming throughout. Without transcribing the little volume I could not give a true idea of it: but here shall ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... will be the punctilio and excellence of the waiting of the Javanese table boys. When one saw the carefulness with which each dish was served, and the superior nature of the side dishes, one thought with a shudder of the sloppy vegetables, the dusty marmalade, and the slipshod waiting of the China boy in some of the hotels it had been our misfortune to ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid

... far earlier period than that of Fielding or Smollett; but his gravity and sentimental earnestness only helped to endear him to the women. Of the style of Richardson there is little to be said; the reader never thinks of it. If he forces himself to regard it, he sees that it is apt to be slipshod, although so trim and systematic. Richardson was a man of unquestionable genius, dowered with extraordinary insight into female character, and possessing the power to express it; but he had little humor, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various

... 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

... tone of unspoke speeches, Or like a lobster clad in logic breeches, Or like the gray fur of a crimson cat, Or like the mooncalf in a slipshod hat; E'en such is he who never was begotten Until his children were ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... whose eunuchs ruled in his stead, whose lackeys dispensed exiles, death, consulates and crucifixions; whose valets insulted the senate, insulted Rome, insulted the sovereign that ruled the world, whose people shared his consort's couch; a slipshod drunkard in a tattered gown—such was the imbecile that succeeded Caligula and ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus

... 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 ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson

... 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 the mass-production ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various

... she saw it in fancy made over and made right from the bottom—she saw Madame's duplicity succeeded by something of Brandywine & Plummer's inflexible honesty, and the flimsy base of the structure supplanted by a solid foundation of credit. For she had come often enough to Dinard's to discern the slipshod and unsystematic methods beneath the ornate and extravagant surface. Her naturally quick powers of observation had detected at a glance conditions of which the elder Mrs. Fowler was never aware. ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow

... With 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

... unless you feed them with oil, they too go out from old age. Again, the body is apt to get gross from exercise; but the intellect becomes nimbler by exercising itself. For what Caecilius means by "old dotards of the comic stage" are the credulous, the forgetful, and the slipshod. These are faults that do not attach to old age as such, but to a sluggish, spiritless, and sleepy old age. Young men are more frequently wanton and dissolute than old men; but yet, as it is not all young men that are so, but the bad set among them, ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... 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

... of rats and mice which had established themselves on the premises; and above all, Mr Tankardew himself was dilapidated in his dress, and in his whole appearance and habits—his very voice was dilapidated, and his words slipshod and slovenly. ...
— Nearly Lost but Dearly Won • Theodore P. Wilson

... 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

... universal custom. It was quite a new aspect of life, so new that she was not sure whether she liked or disliked it; although, if she had been given her choice of remaining at the College or returning to the old, slipshod, do-as-you-please regime of her schoolroom at Kilmore, she would have decided most emphatically, despite strict rules, scoldings, snubs, and unwelcome ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil

... 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 were called Ping-pongs, ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service

... seems to have perceived that the whole thing was only a fevered dream of a diseased age." Now the reviewer, if he knows anything of the doctrines in question, is entitled to express his opinion of them, even if he does it in tautological and slipshod English. But he has no right to attribute his own opinions to M. Sainte-Beuve, who is so far from holding them that, in articles written so lately as in 1861 (Nouveaux Lundis, I.), he has not only traced the enduring influence of Saint-Simonianism ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... novelty in the list, unless the fact that "Lakm" was transformed into a novelty by the Italian version; it had been heard before in English, and the performance was so desperately slipshod, notwithstanding that Mme. Patti impersonated the heroine, that it awakened only pity for Delibes's work. It would be extremely interesting and doubtless instructive also were I able to give such a ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... you walking slipshod? 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

... a majority of 46, was certainly no common performer on the parliamentary stage; and yet Lord Palmerston had very slender claims to the title of an orator. His style was not only devoid of ornament and rhetorical device, but it was slipshod and untidy in the last degree. He eked out his sentences with "hum" and "hah;" he cleared his throat, and flourished his pocket-handkerchief, and sucked his orange; he rounded his periods with "you know what I mean" ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell

... served; and his mode of obtaining power did not hinder his availing himself of the best talent in France. The case of his nephew was the reverse of this. His highest quality was his tenacity of purpose, and his disposition was inclined to kindly tolerance, even of pecuniary greed and slipshod service. He could rouse himself to great exertion; but in the later days of Imperialism, pain and his decaying physical powers had rendered him inert; moreover, in his general habits he had always ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer

... pun, For slipshod rhyme, and lazy word, Have pity on this graceless one— Thy mercy ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley

... it,—surveying, navigation, mechanics, mathematical astronomy, and conic sections, as well as the ordinary course in mathematics; the calculus she had worked through at sixteen under a very able and exact teacher, and took her diploma from W.H. Wells, a master who allowed nothing to go slipshod. She was absorbed in studies of this kind, and took no especial interest in composition or literature beyond what was required, and what was the natural outcome of a literary atmosphere and inherited culture; that is, her mind was passively rather ...
— The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball - That Floats in the Air • Jane Andrews

... 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 roundness ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone

... particularly given to this slipshod fashion of promiscuous and unlicensed book-borrowing, if we can trust the apparent proof given by Connecticut newspapers in their many advertisements of lost books. In some notices it is darkly hinted ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle

... the words which, in the somewhat slipshod use of everyday life, have come to have as ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner

... are purposely almost caricatures, have in them the possibility of complete portrayals. There is no flagging of the invention in any of them, no slipshod or careless composition. Her technique, too, at least in farce, is masterful, and in her plays of modern life of other form adequate. That she could master historical drama, as I have said, I must doubt, but that she need restrict ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt

... while the back was reserved as Agnes's boudoir, where her little work-table and stool were set by a small window, looking out over the little garden towards Fetter Lane, bounded on the right hand by the wall of Saint Andrew's Church. The door was opened by a rather slipshod girl, the ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt

... were 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

... 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

... 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

... permanent service until they heard from Luck. He put them to work gathering up the saddle-horses that had been turned loose when Luck's picture was finished, and repairing harness and attending to the numberless details of reorganizing a ranch long left to slipshod make-shifts. ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower

... time 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 husky sort of ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres

... spite 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 golden age. The Eastern gate, erected at Karnak in the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... window in the Strand, for which the proprietor of the shop held him liable. The money was forthcoming on this time too, to repair her papa's disaster, and was carried down by Lady Mirabel's servant to the slipshod messenger and aide-de-camp of the Captain, who brought the letter announcing his mishap. If the servant had followed the Captain's aide-de-camp who carried the remittance, he would have seen that gentleman, a person of ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray

... "Simply because the slipshod writers of the present day have spoiled our taste for fine English," interjected Miss ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon

... 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 unsuspiciously ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon

... day we 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

... cellar-kitchen, the cold, windy, desolate attic, devoid of any comfort, where the domestics are doomed to pass their whole time, are witnesses to what such families consider economy. Economy in the view of some is undisguised slipshod slovenliness in the home-circle for the sake of fine clothes to be shown abroad; it is undisguised hard selfishness to servants and dependents, counting their every approach to comfort a needless waste,—grudging ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... C2.12. This slipshod style, how accounted for? The most puzzling thing of all is the sort of mental confusion between Cyrus ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon

... in all of the trades, competitions, industries and occupations of life. Again, he is learning, slowly perhaps, but surely, that he must outgrow the weakness and confusion resulting from distracted purposes; that he must have one aim, and be one thing all the time. He must stop doing things in a slipshod and half-way manner and become more thorough. He must put the force of a strong character and a determined will power into whatever he undertakes, and he must stop stumbling and falling over impediments, especially of ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... not 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 ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed

... with 'em, Mrs. Gaylor?" Nick asked. He spoke carelessly, in the matter of accent as well as of his feeling about the clothes. He cut off his words in a slipshod way, as if he had never had time to think much about the value or beauty of the English language. Still, though his speech was not that of a cultivated man, it did not grate on the ear. His voice was singularly pleasant, even sweet, with something ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... streets, where they wandered up and down hardly remembering the ways untrodden by their feet so long, and crying—such abject things those rotten-hearted jails had made them—as they slunk off in their rags, and dragged their slipshod feet along ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens

... 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

... confluence of two rivers, the clear and swiftly-flowing Angara (which rises in Lake Baikal to join the river Yenisei just below Yeniseisk), and the small and unimportant Irkut river. It is an unfinished, slipshod city, a strange mixture of squalor and grandeur, with tortuous, ill-paved streets, where the wayfarer looks instinctively for the "No-thoroughfare" board. There is one long straggling main street with fairly good shops and ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt

... inaccuracies, conceits, and hasty generalizations, one is apt to grow impatient with him. But there are points which connect him with the modern English scholar. In the first place, he was a very hard and systematic student. He had none of the slipshod methods of many men of his type. He had respect for the most recent investigations in his special line of work, — he knew the value of scholarship. The Peabody Library enabled him to have at hand the most recent publications of the ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims

... when we met them again on our return. We chatted with and encouraged them all, pointing out the general healthy, well-conditioned look of the residents. Went on board. How strangely changed the ship appeared! Sunny, motionless, and quiet; no noisy children, no slatternly, slipshod women rolling about the decks, no slush, no washing of dirty linen in dirtier water. There was the old mate in a clean shirt at last, leaning against the mainmast, and smoking his yard of clay; the butcher close—shaven and clean; the ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler

... that cannot be done in slipshod, haphazard manner. The system's need for radioactives ...
— Medal of Honor • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... 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 ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... 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 slumbers ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... knew that the ink-spattered arm was sinewy and ready, that a stout and loyal heart beat under the soiled shirt, and that the slipshod slippers did not prevent its owner's foot from being "put down" very firmly on occasion. He accordingly met the shrewd, good-humored blue eyes of his faithful ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte

... acquainted with the spoken language of Amoy. Few men, if any, had a more extensive knowledge of its vocables. He spoke idiomatically and beautifully as the Chinese themselves spoke, and not as he thought they should speak. There was no slipshod work with him in this particular. Here was the indispensable furnishing and he must get it. And he did get it in no average measure. This was the prime requisite, and through no other avenue could he get really and honestly to work. There is no royal road to the acquisition ...
— Forty Years in South China - The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D. • Rev. John Gerardus Fagg

... sever his business connection with Mr. Kendall, both on account of the increasing feebleness of that gentleman, and because, while admittedly the soul of honor, Mr. Kendall had kept their joint accounts in a very careless and slipshod manner, thereby causing considerable financial loss to the inventor. But, true to his friends, as he always was, he replies to Dr. Gale ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse



Words linked to "Slipshod" :   sloppy, slapdash, careless, haphazard



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