Word: maladroit
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...setting of the stories varies, from Guyana, its towns "smiling...with rotting teeth"; to London, a city of secrets where neither men, women nor buildings are what they appear to be. Melville even includes a rather maladroit cliche, in "I Do Not Take Messages from Dead People"--where a small socialist banana republic overflows with corrupt politicians...
...disapproving sinister (on the left, inauspicious) and the flattering dexterous (on the right, skillful). The Spanish word for left-handed, zurdo, means malicious. If you are gauche (left) in France, you are tactless and unsophisticated. Adroit comes from the French a droit (to the right), and we know what maladroit means -- especially when we see a left-handed violinist bowing northwest while the rest of the string section is northeast. A left-handed compliment is not nice, but a right-hand man is indispensable. If you get up on the wrong (left) side of the bed, you are grumpy. Even...
...formal rationale for the commissioner's decision was as irrelevant as the details of the government's tax case against Al Capone. What mattered was that Steinbrenner's 17-season reign of terror was finally over, and the Yankees were liberated from the egomaniacal whirl of managerial musical chairs, maladroit trades and the public castigation of star players and pitching coaches alike...
...been in love so often that her heart felt like a sponge mop") are certainly warning signs. So is Alther's early summary of the passions that bind two women "Elke felt like a pile of nails being pulled to pieces by a magnet residing inside Clea." But such maladroit introductory passages could be dismissed as the ironic setup for a comic romp. Far more convincing instead to plunge to the heart of the novel for this glimpse of Clea's development: "She burned to take this lad to bed and teach him what she'd learned in a lifetime...
...that had just slaughtered thousands of its citizens. The President explained that preserving U.S. leverage over future developments in that largest of Third World communist nations meant avoiding the temptation to "isolate" its government. Bush was properly criticized not for the principle he was enunciating but for the gratuitous, maladroit way he applied it. Simply keeping his ambassador in Beijing should have sufficed...