shiftlessness

"Will you serve me faithfully, without complaint or shiftlessness, at my direction?"

There was going to be no more of this putting off, letting him go on with his expensive and embarrassing shiftlessness.

I think she suffers from her husband's shiftlessness.

Gustine looks down at her hands, tingling with shiftlessness.

Shiftlessness and poverty reigned in the place.

Some perverse spirit seemed to possess him and drive him out of his easy-going shiftlessness.

"Probably just shiftlessness on my part.

Second, she points out how the conventions of minstrel shows ("fecklessness, shiftlessness and shamelessness") endure today.

They hurled charges of shiftlessness, impudence and outright criminality at the freed blacks.

But I thought he was talking about his alcoholism and shiftlessness, the way he'd failed Sunny and the kids."

It accounted for the change from the happy-go-lucky shiftlessness to the beaten and defeated and driven attitude.

Of all the shiftlessness!"

That is shiftlessness.

After a year of shiftlessness, he was hired in 1984 as a handyman and chauffeur for Paul Mellon, the philanthropist.

Could he not defy all the muddy mob that he (once a Socialist) had, for its weak shiftlessness, come to despise?

It is hardly surprising that nine years of persevering shiftlessness should have resulted in nothing but the ability to procure the bare necessaries of life.

Everything about the place, even the obscene downslope of the couches, proclaimed tasteless-ness, shiftlessness, vulgarity, and, at bottom, sheer ignorance.

In the long period of his preparation, he must betray often an ignorance and shiftlessness in popular arts, incurring the disdain of the able who shoulder him aside.

It is remarkable what a serious business men make of getting their dinners, and how universally shiftlessness and a grovelling taste take refuge in a merely ant-like industry.

"What black males see as cool, as being suave and debonair, can be read by whites as signifying irresponsibility, shiftlessness or unconcern," Dr. Majors said.

The oldest of these satellite schools is in Egavaboyapalle, a formerly deforested village of 250 families, all from a caste that has a reputation for "shiftlessness" and "highway robbery."

He tried to train the lad to work in the mill, and was patient beyond what the patience of most fathers would have been with his stepson's idleness and shiftlessness.

We do but emerge now from a period of deliberate happy-go-lucky and the influence of Herbert Spencer, who came near raising public shiftlessness to the dignity of a national philosophy.

To do otherwise, he maintains, would be to buy into a corrupt system that holds an Irishman guilty until proven innocent, not just of terrorism but of shiftlessness and drunkenness as well.

His spirit and his pride belonged, you might say, to the nose; while it was the general shiftlessness expressed by the other that had thrown him from situation to situation, and at length on board the emigrant ship.