Word: shiftless
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Aubrey struck one of his contemporaries as "shiftless . . . roving . . . magotie-headed, and sometimes little better than crazed." Yet his collection of yarns and records is today one of Oxford University's most priceless possessions. Anthony Powell's new biography of Aubrey (the first written in more than a century) shows why. He may not have been a great scholar, but like his contemporary, Sam Pepys, he had a lively...
Witch Sinkanda shows up, Timothy is literally led to Hell. By day she's just one of shiftless Mr. Farr's many daughters, but at night she's up to all sorts of fearful business. She can slip in through a keyhole, hex the unwary and fly through the night air. When Timothy throws his Bible in the fireplace and burns the house down while two of its occupants are asleep, it looks like an accident, but Sinkanda knows better. She and Tim have an affair that is both earthy and unearthly. Together they fly to Hell...
Earnest A. Hooton, self-winding Harvard anthropologist, unwound a wallop at love on the dole. "Stupid, shiftless, and improvident human beings breed the most rapidly," he informed a California lecture audience, "because they feel little responsibility to their offspring and recognize no obligation to society. . . . If we must feed and foster the incompetent, we should at the same time prevent their reproducing their kind...
Villagers of Filkins, in the lush green Cotswolds, where Cripps was the local squire, tell a significant story of his earlier days there. Cripps heard that a shiftless villager called Old Joe was in debt. He went to see him. "Nice little house you have here," said Sir Stafford. "You don't want to sell...
...rest of Caldwell's characters are off the same near-caricature assembly line as Molly and Lily. For the perennial Jeeter-type there is Jethro, Putt's shiftless farmhand brother. The strait-laced minister's young wife has "vitamin" binges with Molly on the sly, finally runs off with a salesman. "He [Rev. Bigbee] won't even let me undress without turning out the lights, and I have to wear long-sleeved nightgowns that drag the floor. This morning as soon as he left I took off all my clothes and ran out into the backyard...