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inept
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show 145 more with this conextual meaning
  • Whatever Zaphod's qualities of mind might include—dash, bravado, conceit— he was mechanically inept and could easily blow the ship up with an extravagant gesture.†   (source)
  • Shocking, really, that a romance novelist could be so inept at the language of the heart.†   (source)
  • CHEEVER, ineptly reaching toward Elizabeth: No, no, I am forbid to leave her from my sight.†   (source)
  • I press my lips together at the memories of rain dripping through stones, my inept attempts at flirting, and the aroma of my favorite Capitol dish in the chilly air.†   (source)
  • He smiled, elated by my inept flirting.†   (source)
  • Hatsumomo sighed, as if to tell me what an inept liar I was, and then began paging through my journal.†   (source)
  • All I want to say is that when you stop being delusional and start feeling desperate because you're too inept to figure this out on your own, you know who to come to.†   (source)
  • He feels inept, clumsy, as he tastes and smells her there, and yet he hears her whispering his name, telling him it feels wonderful.†   (source)
  • Partly because Lord Naito was an inept egomaniac.†   (source)
  • He was trying to teach the "Hava Nagilia" to a rapt but inept circle of admirers.†   (source)
  • Besides, I told myself, there are no bad dogs, only inept, clueless owners like Jenny and me.†   (source)
  • You can opt for the soft-core approach, describing parts and movements in a haze of breathy metaphors and heroic adverbs: he achingly stroked her quivering skiff as it rode the waves of her desire, etc. This second sort is hard to write without seeming (a) quaint, (b) squeamish, (c) hugely embarrassed, (d) inept.†   (source)
  • Two inept translators, a man and a woman, provided mediocre translation over a pair ofmicrophones, but they often forgot to translate and we, the frustrated audience, were left to guess for ourselves most of the time.†   (source)
  • The next year, in Bill Walsh's system of well-timed passes, the seemingly inept Deberg threw more passes (578) than any quarterback in the history of the NFL.†   (source)
  • They targeted COP Falcon, but ineptly.†   (source)
  • I see Pollux made it through, so I suppose you aren't completely inept.†   (source)
  • Not only were Africans savages, they were bumbling, inept savages, rather like their bumbling, inept brethren at home.†   (source)
  • Burnham became an avid player of bridge, though he was known widely for being utterly inept at the game.†   (source)
  • I'm not expecting miracles, but neither did I imagine I'd feel this clumsy and inept.†   (source)
  • He understood , now, finally , that he was a bit of a dullard at doing this trick, but it was the only one he knew, and if he always ended up doing it ineptly, he at least never failed to do it with love.†   (source)
  • Inept or disreputable companies have on more than one occasion failed to deliver crucial logistical support-oxygen, for instance-as promised.†   (source)
  • To Hawat, they appeared to be Fremen, but a curiously inept band.†   (source)
  • Ineptly, he asked, "Have you and Richard talked about this at all?"†   (source)
  • Norah had gone with her once, but the service, with its complex rituals of kneeling and standing, prayer and silence, had made her feel inept, an outsider.†   (source)
  • I was very much against this for the simple reason that I was still inept with knife and fork, and I did not want to embarrass myself in front of these sharp-eyed girls.†   (source)
  • If I'd been as inept with a sword as I was in a saddle, my father might not have driven me so hard to be a soldier and to let the title of King's Thief lapse forever.†   (source)
  • The new kid looked a little nervous and pale, but other than that he had a nice smile and didn't seem socially inept or anything like that.†   (source)
  • Not only was he inept where feelings were concerned, he was also a dolt with horses.†   (source)
  • In the past, only a dramatically inept or difficult student was held back a grade.†   (source)
  • Cedric watches the party unfold, feeling the room's pounding energy flow through him, while he tries to reconcile himself with crushing ineptness.†   (source)
  • Luckily for Milkman, she had proved, so far, to be the world's most inept killer.†   (source)
  • The poor stayed poor and the upper class stayed rich under a succession of cruel, inept leaders.†   (source)
  • Washington had proven indecisive and inept.†   (source)
  • Shop really isn't so bad, either, even if it does make me feel inept and useless most of the time.†   (source)
  • From the time I married Sam, my rule has been to make mutton of any who proves an inept mother, and the result is an easy lambing when the weather is with us.†   (source)
  • He could not know at the moment, but those same instincts had enabled him to survive the mad Stalin as a youth, the blustering Khrushchev in middle age, and the inept Brezhnev a few years later.†   (source)
  • Across the room, Ann and Phil and Ed are horsing around, Ed giving a lecture on the perfect tennis serve to Ann and Phil, the inept, giggling pupils.†   (source)
  • I've become patron saint of the socially inept.†   (source)
  • If she would not ride with him, he would have to meet her in another fashion, but he was inept at such things, and terrified of parties and receptions, where he was all legs.†   (source)
  • When Changó found out, he tracked down his inept accomplice to the foot of a palm tree.†   (source)
  • Few men could have successfully followed Abraham Lincoln as president, but Andrew Johnson proved particularly inept.†   (source)
  • If a widespread conspiracy does develop, it will probably be because the national government becomes inept at advancing the people's happiness.†   (source)
  • He made an inept and rather violent attempt to cross over to Franny's collarbone.†   (source)
  • Abby passed her to Red, who made a big show of dismay and ineptness but later was caught pressing his nose to her downy head, drawing in a long deep breath of baby smell.†   (source)
  • When the alcoholic vet touched him with his unsteady, inept hand, I saw the look of veiled contempt in Charley's eyes.†   (source)
  • Hoss's thought process, far from inept, was also as exhaustive and as unimaginatively single-minded as the snout of an anteater and brooked few deviations.†   (source)
  • Luke's bitchiness was inept and sentimental by comparison, mere callow petulance.†   (source)
  • A most ineptly chosen term!†   (source)
  • As Reich left the booth, a man clothed in an air of inept eagerness accosted him.†   (source)
  • inept handling of the account
  • I doubted if awkward, self-conscious, and inept added up todesirable in anyone's book.†   (source)
  • In practice, they were more like the public relations wing of an inept fire department.†   (source)
  • I reach to hit my horn, decide not to and drive home, feeling guilty and inept.†   (source)
  • If the Japanese are this inept, Phil thought, America will win this war.†   (source)
  • BESIDES BEING PARTICULARLY INEPT, A LOT OF JUNDIS were just lazy.†   (source)
  • But if she backed out now, it would make her seem flighty (at best) or inept (at worst).†   (source)
  • We cannot have such inept chess players in our employ.†   (source)
  • She felt inept, unnerved by being out on her own, and no longer part of her group.†   (source)
  • "Let us hope you are not as inept as you look," Ser Alliser said.†   (source)
  • Adams charged McHenry with inept management, of failing to clothe the troops adequately.†   (source)
  • I think these drawings are inept: I can do much better now.†   (source)
  • Crudely, miserably, ineptly-but it could have lasted and helped them to last.†   (source)
  • Already, harsh words were being hung on him: arrogant, inept, overconfident.†   (source)
  • They were inept at first but industrious.†   (source)
  • The only thing that makes me feel better is that Josh seems to be as socially inept as me.†   (source)
  • He would be strong, but inept.†   (source)
  • He was hyperkinetic, aloof, and so socially inept that the interviewers often came away with the impression he was mentally ill.†   (source)
  • Last time he had fallen off his broom due to the presence of dementors around the pitch, and the time before that, all the bones had been removed from his arm by the incurably inept Professor Lockhart...That had been his most painful injury by far ...he remembered the agony of regrowing an armful of bones in one night, a discomfort not eased by the arrival of an unexpected visitor in the middle of the — Harry sat bolt upright, his heart pounding, his bandage turban askew.†   (source)
  • I'm blind, not inept!†   (source)
  • A few of the Bene Gesserit had long been aware that the Guild could not interfere directly with the vital spice source because Guild navigators already were dealing in their own inept way with higher order dimensions, at least to the point where they recognized that the slightest misstep they made on Arrakis could be catastrophic†   (source)
  • I ask what pieces he's been working on, but he flicks my inept question away with contempt, as if only a moron would ask such a thing at this particular moment.†   (source)
  • The other team might have an inept cornerback, for instance, and the smart coach will know how to exploit him.†   (source)
  • The long afternoons she spent browsing through dictionary and thesaurus made for constructions that were inept, but hauntingly so: the coins a villain concealed in his pocket were "esoteric," a hoodlum caught stealing a car wept in "shameless auto-exculpation," the heroine on her thoroughbred stallion made a "cursory" journey through the night, the king's furrowed brow was the "hieroglyph" of his displeasure.†   (source)
  • The Japanese agreed, and the POW officers then replaced the inept thieves with University of Thievery alumni.†   (source)
  • The pass rush rendered Joe Montana so inept that in the second half Walsh benched him and inserted his backup, Steve Young.†   (source)
  • I'd asked him to walk with me, flirting ineptly but successfully, in order to pump him for information.†   (source)
  • The queen had also wished to forbid the follies, comic combats where cripples, dwarfs, and crones had at one another with cleavers, torches, and hammers (the more inept the fighters, the funnier the folly, it was thought), but Hizdahr said his people would love her more if she laughed with them, and argued that without such frolics, the cripples, dwarfs, and crones would starve.†   (source)
  • But I thought of the Seeker's skeptical face, her bulging eyes bright with suspicion, and knew my inept attempts at subterfuge would fail.†   (source)
  • But no one spoke of it in his hearing ...and since the only witness lacked a tongue, he need not fear anyone learning just how inept a swordsman the Kingslayer had become.†   (source)
  • I remained an enthusiastic but pitifully inept lover, and she received little pleasure from my carryings on.†   (source)
  • She opened the matchbox compartment successfully, but one inept scratch of a match sent the box to the floor.†   (source)
  • The building had an air of silent malevolence, like a puffed, venomous mushroom; it was obviously modern, but its sloppy, rounded, ineptly unspecific lines made it look like a primitive structure unearthed in the heart of the jungle, devoted to some secret rites of savagery.†   (source)
  • In feudal times an ineptness with sword and spear headed a young man for the church: in the Hamilton family Joe's inability properly to function at farm and forge headed him for a higher education.†   (source)
  • Clytie, not inept, anything but inept: perverse inscrutable and paradox: free, yet incapable of freedom who had never once called herself a slave, holding fidelity to none like the indolent and solitary wolf or bear (yes, wild half untamed black, half Sutpen blood and if 'untamed' be synonymous with 'wild; then 'Sutpen' is the silent unsleeping viciousness of th†   (source)
  • To omit a word always, to resort to inept metaphors and obvious periphrases, is perhaps the most emphatic way of stressing it.†   (source)
  • It is like a casting of fading bronze upon the pillow, the hands alone still with any semblance of life: a curled, gnarled ineptness; a spent yet alert quality from which weariness, exhaustion, travail has not yet departed, as though they doubted even yet the actuality of rest, guarding with horned and penurious alertness the cessation which they know cannot last.†   (source)
  • A blow, expected, repeated, falling on a bruise, with no smart or shock of surprise, only a dull and sickening pain and the doubt whether another like it could be borne—that was how it felt, sitting opposite Sebastian at dinner that night, seeing his clouded eye and groping movements, hearing his thickened voice breaking in, ineptly, after long brutish silences.†   (source)
  • Set up standards of achievement open to all, to the least, to the most inept—and you stop the impetus to effort in all men, great or small.†   (source)
  • Its proportions are inept.†   (source)
  • THE BYSTANDER [inept at definition] It's a—well, it's a copper's nark, as you might say.†   (source)
  • If these two noticed Angel's growing social ineptness, he noticed their growing mental limitations.†   (source)
  • She had drunk a quantity of champagne, and during the course of her song she had decided, ineptly, that everything was very, very sad — she was not only singing, she was weeping too.†   (source)
  • From that perspective, the lapses and eccentricities in his everyday appearance were apparently mere imperfections, or inept adaptations, were the vestiges or hints of a pure and true nature that could not be totally eradicated.†   (source)
  • The life which had been so charming that he could not bear to leave it now seemed inept; he was seized with a distaste for the cafes, the restaurants with their ill-cooked food, the shabby way in which they all lived.†   (source)
  • "Yes, you're quite right, Mr. K.," said Mrs. Grubach, and then, to her misfortune, as soon as she felt just a little freer to speak, she added something rather inept.†   (source)
  • He was cordial; he invited Martin to step out for a dish of tea as though he almost meant it; but beside him Martin felt young, rustic, inept.†   (source)
  • He had long been outside of the world of simple desires and their fulfillments, and he was inept and uncertain.†   (source)
  • The participants—almost all of them old acquaintances of ours, including Hans Castorp—showed some skill, to a greater or lesser degree, although a few of them were totally inept.†   (source)
  • Dick remained in his seat wearing an odd expression; then he crashed into words with a harsh ineptness.†   (source)
  • With feverish high spirits he greets the teacher, a blush on her downy cheeks after watching it all—and now bombards Miss Robinson with English conversation of such inanity that the old maid, being inept at ecstasy, recoils and measures him with apprehensive glances.†   (source)
  • Impatience and anger prompted him, however, to the most inept and incredible explanation of how he looked into his father's window and how he respectfully withdrew.†   (source)
  • I can only stomach so much ineptitude in any one day.†   (source)
    standard suffix: The suffix "-itude" converts an adjective to a noun.
  • At length, from Forte's ineptitude and lurching clumsiness, a fight broke out between them.†   (source)
  • You are not going to pass off your many ineptitudes on the students of Hogwarts.†   (source)
    standard suffix: The suffix "-itude" converts an adjective to a noun.
  • the teachers had meant them to lose, and it was only Bonzo's ineptitude that had saved them.†   (source)
  • She did not want to expose her ineptitude by asking among the nurses or porters.†   (source)
  • He barely kept up with his training partners, lagging along behind with happy ineptitude.†   (source)
  • The chaplain was despondent with an acceptance of his own ineptitude.†   (source)
  • So we talked of intimate things and we kissed again and I forgot about my ineptitude.†   (source)
  • Still, Laila could not shake the feeling that at one time, before Ahmad and Noor had gone to war against the Soviets-before Babi had let them go to war-Mammy too had thought Babi's bookishness endearing, that, once upon a time, she too had found his forgetfulness and ineptitude charming.†   (source)
  • Alec went on for several minutes, accusing his assistant at length of clumsiness, idleness, stupidity, and general ineptitude.†   (source)
  • Demi-autistic, genetically speaking; single-track tunnel-vision minds, a marked degree of social ineptitude — these were not your sharp dressers — and luckily for everyone there, a high tolerance for mildly deviant public behaviour.†   (source)
  • Confirming her social ineptitude yet again, his former colleague had chosen the Redskins game as a perfect moment to chat him up and request a favor.†   (source)
  • dead on a marble floor, stop it stop it, muttering aloud to myself in elevators, in cabs, leave me alone, I want to die, a cold, intelligent, self-immolating fury that had —more than once driven me upstairs in a resolute fog to swallow indiscriminate combos of whatever booze and pills I happened to have on hand: only tolerance and ineptitude that I'd botched it, unpleasantly surprised when I woke up though relieved for Hobie that he hadn't had to find me.†   (source)
  • Working without a single hard fact, islanders drew a variety of conclusions: pilot error, pilot inexperience, misread charts, crossed signals, fog, wind, tide, ineptitude.†   (source)
  • He had never seen a wizard work things out like this, simply by looking and touching; but Harry had long since learned that bangs and smoke were more often the marks of ineptitude than expertise.†   (source)
  • It made him proud to observe that twenty-nine months in the service had not blunted his genius for ineptitude.†   (source)
  • Triflingly witty, Mr. McLean, but I would like you to account for your people's history of ineptitude.†   (source)
  • Now, in a desperate attempt to cover their own ineptitude, they've arrested my brother and they're holding my father.†   (source)
  • They were bewildered, unhappy children-he thought-all of them, even his mother, and he was foolish to resent their ineptitude; it came from their helplessness, not from malice.†   (source)
  • We made a mess of Treadstone, and they don't want our ineptitude in Hong Kong during these sensitive times.†   (source)
  • While it's true that I don't know where every item in the house is located, this has more to do with different filing systems than any ineptitude on my part.†   (source)
  • It wasn't ineptitude.†   (source)
  • Anger at her own ineptitude.†   (source)
  • Moody journeyed to the passport office, spending the entire day there, frustrated by long lines and bureaucratic ineptitude.†   (source)
  • I would even feed the mythology of the Black Pimpernel by taking a pocketful of "tickeys" 20 (threepenny pieces) and phoning individual newspaper reporters from telephone boxes and relaying to them stories of what we were planning or of the ineptitude of the police.†   (source)
  • The chaplain glanced at the bridge table that served as his desk and saw only the abominable orange-red pear-shaped plum tomato he had obtained that same morning from Colonel Cathcart, still lying on its side where he had forgotten it like an indestructible and incamadine symbol of his own ineptitude.†   (source)
  • It was the only emotion I had ever seen him display toward people-a biting, bitter, weary hatred for any ineptitude that dared to oppose him.†   (source)
  • All he could ever see was Aarfy, with whose fustian, moon-faced ineptitude he had finally lost all patience, and there were minutes of agonizing fury and frustration in the sky when he hungered to be demoted again to a wing plane with a loaded machine gun in the compartment instead of the precision bombsight that he really had no need for, a powerful, heavy fifty-caliber machine gun he could seize vengefully in bot†   (source)
  • The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains.†   (source)
  • The adversary she found herself forced to fight was not worth matching or beating; it was not a superior ability which she would have found honor in challenging; it was ineptitude-a gray spread of cotton that deemed soft and shapeless, that could offer no resistance to anything or anybody, yet managed to be a barrier in her way.†   (source)
  • He wondered why ineptitude should exist and have its say.†   (source)
  • By creating the contrast it will have made itself a part of the great ineptitude, its most ludicrous part.†   (source)
  • He made his greatest effort and learned to keep silent, to keep the place others described as his place, to accept ineptitude as his master—and to wait.†   (source)
  • Did you want to scream, when you were a child, seeing nothing but fat ineptitude around you, knowing how many things could be done and done so well, but having no power to do them?†   (source)
  • We seem to recall something or other that this Howard Roark has built before, and it had the same ineptitude, the same pedestrian quality of an overambitious amateur.†   (source)
  • It would mean doing for you what I did for Peter Keating: lie, flatter, evade, compromise, pander to every ineptitude—in order to beg of them a chance for you, beg them to let you live, to let you function, to beg them, Roark, not to laugh at them, but to tremble because they hold the power to hurt you.†   (source)
  • In the radiance of these discoveries, and the tumult of their reaction, she made a fool of herself as freely and conspicuously as when she so rashly adopted Eliza's expletive in Mrs. Higgins's drawing-room; for the new-born Wellsian had to find her bearings almost as ridiculously as a baby; but nobody hates a baby for its ineptitudes, or thinks the worse of it for trying to eat the matches; and Clara lost no friends by her follies.†   (source)
  • If I were betrayed as he was, I would console myself; but to be in the midst of persons elevated by myself to places of honor, who ought to watch over me more carefully than over themselves,—for my fortune is theirs—before me they were nothing—after me they will be nothing, and perish miserably from incapacity—ineptitude!†   (source)
  • The vices of rulers and the ineptitude of the people would speedily bring about its ruin; and the nation, weary of its representatives and of itself, would create freer institutions, or soon return to stretch itself at the feet of a single master.†   (source)
  • This stupid repetition was too incongruous in its ineptitude with the serious, brooding and enigmatic glance he turned upon his visitor.†   (source)
  • What ineptitude!†   (source)
  • A boy inept at battle.†   (source)
  • /His/, after a noun or pronoun connoting both sexes, often sounds inept, and /his-or-her/ is intolerably clumsy.†   (source)
  • As the difference of Counsell from Command, hath been now deduced from the nature of Counsell, consisting in a deducing of the benefit, or hurt that may arise to him that is to be Counselled, by the necessary or probable consequences of the action he propoundeth; so may also the differences between apt, and inept counsellours be derived from the same.†   (source)
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