In the last year alone veteran editors have published two books - Andre Schiffrin's "Business of Books" and Jason Epstein's more laconically titled (but less depressed) "Book Business" - basically making the case that publishing is a hopeless enterprise.

The neighborhood was commercial land not yet occupied by factories, jumble of small shops, marginal businesses, hovels, and hopeless minor enterprise.

There were over 2,000 Druuf ships participating in the encirclement and this concentration turned a transition into a hopeless enterprise.

G.T Griffith has written that Achaean War was a hopeless enterprise for the Achaeans, badly led and backed by no adequate reserves of money or men.

But you should have known from the beginning that you embarked on a hopeless enterprise.

The distinctive sense of abandon is that of giving up a thing absolutely and finally; as, to abandon one's friends, places, opinions, good or evil habits, a hopeless enterprise, a shipwrecked vessel.

He who would wade into this swamp must first immerse himself in Buckley vs. Valeo , the 1976 Supreme Court case that made campaign-finance reform a sadistically complicated and possibly hopeless enterprise.

Ugaki exemplified the unthinking militarism and the kamikaze spirit - indeed he became a kamikaze - of many Japanese career officers, while Kurita represented a more complicated type; he was a military leader unwilling to sacrifice lives endlessly in a hopeless enterprise.

I tried to out manoeuvre the enemy and break through to the south-west but it was a hopeless enterprise.

So worry was really a hopeless enterprise, in that it could not do anything.