Word: bootless
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...from their doorsills in the corridors of McKinlock. Pushed to no emulation of the native pedal refulgence it is true, the visitors still, after their fashion, set their shoes outside the door to be separated from New England soil by some nocturnal worker. And they found the attempt was bootless. It led Mr. Nugee, their leader, to declare that America's boasted efficiency is in jeopardy when a student calmly allows himself to be enthroned for ten minutes for an operation that could be easily and painlessly accomplished in his sleep...
...stolen, his ship left without him, his girl was kidnapped. Searching for a short cut to town, he wandered into a swamp, was bitten by a deadly stingray; into a smugglers' camp, was befriended ; into a native train guard, was jailed, far inland. He escaped from jail, hatless, bootless, penniless; cleaned up a barroom with his good right fist (the jacket design), set out to walk to Los Agostino, 110 miles away across the Sierras, to get news of his ship, of his lady. Fierce and famishing he s journed to the wilderness. Over the hazardous ice-fields...
This may seem, at a glance, a bootless and altogether ridiculous undertaking, but anyone who grinds his way through the mass of evidence, the wealth of philological comparison, and the intricate reasoning on which the author bases his conclusion cannot but be impressed with his earnestness and industry, if not absolutely convinced of his soundness. To discuss lightly the probability of the case is to be flippant, when one regards the mountain of material with which Mr. Ennis bulwarks his position. And when he passes from the philology of the first essay, to philosophy, economics and metaphysics in the second...
Educators have long dreamed of a Utopian circle of earnest, well-meaning students, an ideal working unit, with no professors to hamper free intellectual development by the imposition of mechanical exercises and bootless reports. Discussion in this happy family would replace lectures; and idea-killing assignments would be unknown. The difficulty, of course, has been in finding the earnest students. But now, university education appears to be returning to its sources, and the mediaevalist recalls the scenes in Bologna when the students at the University drove their unpopular instructors from the gates of the town...
...fail in moderately advanced courses which are essential to further progress in their respective concentration groups shows that this is not being done. It is far better to advise students who are hopelessly in arrears to drop courses than to have them waste their time in bootless effort. If instruction can not be improved or standards lowered; if in order to maintain the reputation of the University recourse must be had to drastic measures; it would be well to substitute the dropped- course method for wholesale failure...