Word: haphazard
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Pierre Bonnard's drawing was fuzzy and weak; the composition of his paintings was haphazard. He borrowed ideas at will from other painters, and frequently flubbed them. When he launched into a picture he just hoped for the best and was never quite sure how it would turn out. (Painting, he suggested, was rather like making hats.) Bonnard had neither Picasso's drive nor Matisse's decisiveness; yet his work rivaled theirs...
What makes the plan utopian is in truth nothing more than that it is a plan. It would substitute for the haphazard standard of Harvard's instruction methods, allowed to exist by accident or whim or unfortified tradition, a policy. The policy would be a standard to which no course would have to conform but which would be there as a guide, a stimulus away from haphazardness and toward an ideal...
...alone with a so-called adviser and the concentration and distribution rules, neither of which are capable of preventing some students from sacrificing themselves to a narrow program and a dogged pursuit of the Cum Laude Cause. Nor can others be prevented from choosing distribution courses in far too haphazard a way to fulfill any of the requisites of a "liberal education...
Generations of scientists have tried to explain how the solar system began. None of the explanations is wholly adequate. The trouble is that the solar system is not a haphazard collection of planets buzzing around the sun. It has remarkable "regularities" which indicate that all its major members had a common and systematic origin...
...decision was further enhanced by the method of voting proposed by the Student Government. Instead of relying on previous haphazard systems, the letter from Council President Joan Projansky outlines a technique which is certain to get a vote from almost every girl in the college...