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innocuous
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show 123 more with this conextual meaning
  • "You . . . you haven't seen Mom in years."
    "That's not true," she said simply, as if I'd told her the wrong time, something that innocuous.   (source)
  • What am I, innocuous?   (source)
    innocuous = harmless
  • Conscious of Astaroth's prohibitions, Max allowed himself no books but took one innocuous paper—a private note that...   (source)
    innocuous = unlikely to harm or disturb
  • Not once, however, had he been able to listen to anything of substance; whenever he had picked up the phone, serious conversation had been replaced by innocuous banter.   (source)
    innocuous = harmless
  • TO LEVEL II. It was an innocuous, straightforward, almost mundane sign. Hall had expected something more—perhaps a stern guard with a machine gun or a sentry to check passes.   (source)
    innocuous = unlikely to disturb
  • For there was one last letter, this one in code, seemingly innocuous in its babbling about hunting and the tedium of life in Niagara.   (source)
    innocuous = harmless
  • I read through the night the story of a native-born Southerner, a man who had tried to follow the crowd, who ran an innocuous little newspaper, The Petal Paper, glad-handed, joined the local civic clubs and kept himself in line with "popular opinion," which meant "popular prejudice," ... in a Christian and 100 percent American fairplay manner, of course.   (source)
    innocuous = unlikely to harm or disturb
  • The great words flutter innocuously to the courtroom floor.   (source)
    innocuously = harmlessly
  • ...from a great Niagara of reading matter to a mere innocuous dripping of...   (source)
    innocuous = unlikely to harm or disturb
  • They could find ways to make something actually very deadly look entirely innocuous.†   (source)
  • The terrace was peaceful and innocuous-looking in the sunshine.   (source)
    innocuous = harmless
  • But a little later it was reminding her a good deal less of that innocuous function.   (source)
  • It is, no doubt, impossible to prevent his praying for his mother, but we have means of rendering the prayers innocuous.   (source)
  • With ... Hal swearing innocuously ... they staggered into John Thornton's camp   (source)
    innocuously = harmlessly
  • Her mind was a store-house of innocuous anecdote   (source)
    innocuous = unlikely to harm or disturb
  • On summer weekends the tourists stroll along the cliffside path or stand on the very edge, taking pictures; I can see their innocuous, annoying white canvas hats going by.†   (source)
  • Outside, it is impossible not to look first at the sky, where a field of summer cumulus, innocuous and white, stretches westward.†   (source)
  • The seemingly innocuous cut became infected.†   (source)
  • Despite the innocuous covers, the lyrics themselves often carried an unmistakable message.†   (source)
  • I shifted the conversation to innocuous topics while we waited.†   (source)
  • Walking closer to the camera, though, was an innocuous-enough seeming man of about fifty, glowing red from head to toe.†   (source)
  • Lewis Merrill was so innocuous, how could I have remembered seeing him in those bleacher seats?†   (source)
  • No need for Freudian smart-aleckry—the explanation was simple and mechanical—the innocuous letter was lying across figure 1236, with its bold spread and rakish crown of pubic hair, while his obscene draft was on the table, within easy reach.†   (source)
  • Innocuously.†   (source)
  • My Internet research had turned up nothing on Lucius Reeve apart from a few innocuous mentions in the society pages, not even a Harvard or Harvard Club affiliation, nothing but a respectable Fifth Avenue address.†   (source)
  • There was even a sort of hope, I thought, that when the poster appeared, it would be perfectly innocuous— something that reminded us of Hailsham, something like that.†   (source)
  • Colic, perhaps, or some other innocuous ailment.†   (source)
  • Apparently, every one of the cheerleaders who dressed up as Lena had somehow used a Sharpie to draw the innocuous crescent moon on her face, instead of eyeliner.†   (source)
  • He hunched over the innocuous little books, his crystal radio and balsa glider on the shelf above him, as though his life depended on learning to read.†   (source)
  • The police and anti-narcotic agencies were focused on other, more market-leading substances, and to the unsuspecting, fungi, whether hallucinogenic or portobello, all seemed the same, and innocuous enough, a fact exploited by a middle-aged local man with a ponytail who ran a small side business that offered rare ingredients for chefs and epicures, and yet was followed and liked in cyberspace mostly by the young.†   (source)
  • As innocuous and boring as that —the name of the road we live on.†   (source)
  • So I tried his spell on the stupidest, most innocuous thing I could think of.†   (source)
  • The rest of her was tiny and innocuous as opposed to the other women in her family, who were, almost without exception, splendid.†   (source)
  • But his own delirium finally interfered with that pleasure, for the mystic music seemed so innocuous compared with the state of his soul that he attempted to make it more exciting with love waltzes, and Lotario Thugut found himself obliged to ask that he leave the choir.†   (source)
  • To my oxygen-depleted mind, the clouds drifting up the grand valley of ice known as the Western Cum* looked innocuous, wispy, insubstantial.†   (source)
  • The proposed guidelines were entirely voluntary and seemed innocuous.†   (source)
  • It's such an innocuous request.†   (source)
  • The behavior, or even the mere presence, of this figure adds a stress to the unstable balance of forces that results in a sudden extreme discharge of violence, similar to the explosion that takes place when a percussion cap ignites a charge of dynamite...The hypothesis of unconscious motivation explains why the murderers perceived innocuous and relatively unknown victims as provocative and thereby suitable targets for aggression.†   (source)
  • Cedric, always attentive to potential threats, has spent the two weeks since the awards ceremony with his face frozen in an innocuous half-smile, trying to look utterly neutral and inert, shrugging a lot as though all his good fortune stems from some sort of clerical error.†   (source)
  • How would one person's seemingly innocuous choice, good or bad, affect a great number of people down the line?†   (source)
  • He had lived innocuously for a little while and then had gone down in flame over Ferrara on the seventh day, while God was resting, when McWatt turned and Yossarian guided him in over the target on a second bomb run because Aarfy was confused and Yossarian had been unable to drop his bombs the first time.†   (source)
  • Innocuous enough, she told herself.†   (source)
  • Despite the innocuous nature of daily tasks, my every thought and action was calculated toward one goal.†   (source)
  • I slapped it onto the huge, previously innocuous but now disgusting foot-long phallus.†   (source)
  • Even the most innocuous-sounding reports of infectious diseases quickly made their way to the headquarters in Atlanta.†   (source)
  • The officers dissected and reconfigured this strategy inside a forbidding-looking wood structure next to division headquarters, a building that bore the deceptively innocuous title of "the conference center."†   (source)
  • It had become an innocuous truism.†   (source)
  • I discovered that these innocuous things made time slip by unnoticed.†   (source)
  • It took her a moment to remember that the innocuously courteous figure she saw bowing to her with a standard smile of welcome was the assistant manager of the apartment house.†   (source)
  • Much of the music has the mid-eighties feel of the Beverly Hills Cop sound track—squeaky blips, pops, and bright, punchy rhythms—but by the fifth or sixth repeat of the music, it fades innocuously into the background.†   (source)
  • Others were small and seemingly innocuous, sometimes affecting only a single flower or a single branch of a tree.†   (source)
  • It had taken the cybersleuths of King Saul Boulevard less than an hour to find a clever trapdoor concealed within an innocuous-looking gaming application.†   (source)
  • You won't be able to pound everybody who makes some innocuous remark about your wife.†   (source)
  • Trembling, unfurrowed, she slipped sidewise, screeching back across grooves of years, to hear again the earnest, high voice of her second or third collegiate love Ray Glozing bitching among "uhs" and the syncopated tonguing of a cavity, about his freshman calculus; "dt," God help this old tattooed man, meant also a time differential, a vanishingly small instant in which change had to be confronted at last for what it was, where it could no longer disguise itself as something innocuous like an average rate; where velocity dwelled in the projectile though the projectile be frozen in midflight, where death dwelled in the cell though the cell be looked in on at its most quick.†   (source)
  • Such an innocuous misunderstanding, she later observed to me, was actually a crucial piece in the finally assembled little mosaic which resolved itself as the portrait of her meeting with Nathan.†   (source)
  • innocuous-looking ones.†   (source)
  • Send in the most innocuous person from Twelve they can come up with.   (source)
  • During the extremely innocuous and very friendly conference,   (source)
    innocuous = harmless
  • If he hadn't despised him, he might not have taken his place a few weeks later on a fairly innocuous road.   (source)
    innocuous = unlikely to disturb (not arousing concern)
  • Innocuously, a man walked past.   (source)
    innocuously = seemingly harmlessly
  • This celebrated statesman was carrying on an innocuous conversation while his mind was riveted on an entirely different subject.   (source)
    innocuous = harmless
  • My mind had raced with awful possibilities, picturing her dead on the highway, but the truth was actually much more innocuous.   (source)
    innocuous = harmless (not disturbing)
  • They spoke for another thirty seconds on innocuous matters and said their goodbyes.†   (source)
    innocuous = unlikely to harm or disturb
  • The crack on my head feels bad, but it could be from something as innocuous as getting into a car.†   (source)
  • But this was nothing so innocuous as desert heat.†   (source)
  • Its most evident manifestation seemed innocuous enough: Woolf was prone to nodding off.†   (source)
  • At the end of the list is a seemingly innocuous, yet oddly mysterious phrase: "natural flavor."†   (source)
  • everything quality that creeps into innocuous remarks and becomes the vanguard of estranged feeling.†   (source)
  • How many of them truly believed what they were doing was so innocuous, Svensson didn't care.†   (source)
  • Every time I objected, it got more and more suspiciously innocuous.†   (source)
  • It was just a soap dish, innocuous enough that I couldn't even remember when we'd gotten it.†   (source)
  • For Sylvie, the church had always been an innocuous entity ....a place of fellowship and introspection ....sometimes just a place to sing out loud without people staring at her.†   (source)
  • Normally, something innocuous had tripped the house alarm, and she would use her override keys to reset it.†   (source)
  • His manner is mild, his hands large, with thick fingers and acquisitive thumbs, his blue eyes uncommunicative, falsely innocuous.†   (source)
  • He lacked the energy to work the crowd, he was fresh out of innocuous drivel; he loitered on the edges gnawing on a burned soydog and silently ripping apart everyone within eyesight.†   (source)
  • I'd spotted him four or five times subsequently, or someone who looked like him, lingering out front during business hours—always when I was with Hobie or a customer, inconvenient to confront him—although he was so innocuous-looking, hoodie and construction-worker boots, I could hardly be sure.†   (source)
  • Saunière's invitation had contained an innocuous postscript expressing fascination with a robotic knight that Saunière was rumored to have built.†   (source)
  • The Masonic organization, and especially Peter Solomon, would find themselves embroiled in a firestorm of controversy and a desperate effort at damage control ....even though the ritual was innocuous and purely symbolic.†   (source)
  • On the book's central pages, in bold print, he wrote hometown contact information for other captives, making it seem to be an innocuous address book.†   (source)
  • This might sound a pretty innocuous sort of response, but actually it was like she'd suddenly got up and hit me, and for the next few moments I felt hot and chilly at the same time.†   (source)
  • Winifred thought I was innocuous.†   (source)
  • In fact, so strong was the Church's fear of those who lived in the rural villes that the once innocuous word for "villager"—villain—came to mean a wicked soul.†   (source)
  • As for how I knew to check the X-ray of Langdon's bag ....in light of my realization that Langdon was involved in all of this, I had my staff reexamine a seemingly innocuous early-morning call between Langdon and Peter Solomon's cell phone, in which the kidnapper, posing as Solomon's assistant, persuaded Langdon to come for a lecture and also to bring a small package that Peter had entrusted to him.†   (source)
  • The letter said that a credible informant had warned military officials that a California man, believed to be working for an innocuous local Japanese organization, had in fact been an employee of the Japanese navy, on assignment to raise money for Japan's war effort.†   (source)
  • Something pocket-size and innocuous.†   (source)
  • The caustic laxative worked so well that Hawley marketed it commercially under the disarmingly innocuous name Slim Jim.†   (source)
  • But she'd never seen such a ravaging animal, not one that was so contagious, so systemic, and so innocuous before reaching maturity and consuming its host like so many piranha.†   (source)
  • Before leaving Paris he had collected the dossiers, and the dossiers behind those dossiers, all seemingly innocuous pages of blank paper in file folders until they were exposed to infrared light, the heat waves bringing up the typewritten script.†   (source)
  • It had been so innocuous, so casual!†   (source)
  • Upon the horizon, Max saw another swell of dark water—an innocuous band, of slate, but he knew that it must be huge.†   (source)
  • He looked at the door with a sensation of malevolent triumph at the thought of all those voices being defeated by the innocuous figure of his secretary, a young man expert at nothing but the art of evasion, which he practiced with the gray, rubber limpness of the amoral.†   (source)
  • Without it they would be filled with innocuous anxieties too placid to contend with; these were the descendants of Guangzhou — the province of Canton — not world-weary Shanghai.†   (source)
  • Innocuous.†   (source)
  • History changed because of a few drops of such an innocuous-looking yellow liquid and one man who had the stomach to use it.†   (source)
  • You would never think, driving past the IBP plant in Lexington, with its colorful children's playground out front, with Wal-Mart and Burger King across the street, that a single, innocuous-looking building could be responsible for so much sudden change, hardship, and despair.†   (source)
  • The automobile, so sleekly efficient on paper, was in practice a civic menace, belching out exhaust, kicking up storms of dust, becoming hopelessly mired in the most innocuous-looking puddles, tying up horse traffic, and raising an earsplitting cacophony that sent buggy horses fleeing.†   (source)
  • McDonald's had made a huge tactical error by asserting that everything in the leaflet was libelous — not only the more extreme claims ("McDonald's and Burger King are ...using lethal poisons to destroy vast areas of Central American rainforest"), but also the more innocuous ones ("a diet high in fat, sugar, animal products, and salt ...is linked with cancers of the breast and bowel, and heart disease").†   (source)
  • Innocuous.†   (source)
  • Not a simple disease as innocuous as Ebola that took weeks to spread properly, but a genetically engineered virus that traveled with the world's air currents and infected the entire world's population.†   (source)
  • Alas, she came to realize that it was this perfectly innocuous fondness, containing no romantic overtone whatever, that Nathan misconstrued, adding fuel to his seething animosity.†   (source)
  • Like a rock falling into one of those bottomless Wieliczka grottoes, he plummeted from her remembrance—another innocuous flirtation consigned to the dusty unopened scrapbook.†   (source)
  • I richly enjoyed the men's john at the Maple Court, where, cantilevered slightly forward over the urinal, I could brood over the plashing clear stream while Guy Lombardo or Sammy Kaye or Shep Fields or some other glutinously innocuous band rumbled faintly from the jukebox beyond the walls.†   (source)
  • Until this instant, hoping against hope, Sophie had said to herself that the woman's advances just might be innocuous, but now, so close, the signs of her voracious letch—first her rapid breathing and then the ripe rosiness spreading like a rash over the bestially handsome face, half Valkyrie, half gutter trull—left no doubt about her intentions.†   (source)
  • There were occasions when he let insults pass unnoticed; there were occasions when he broke a man for an innocuous remark.†   (source)
  • But every time she brought up the subject, Melanie deftly steered the conversation into other and innocuous channels.†   (source)
  • The health and spirits which you want to use in producing lust can also, alas, be very easily used for work or play or thought or innocuous merriment.†   (source)
  • A great human philosopher nearly let our secret out when he said that where Virtue is concerned "Experience is the mother of illusion"; but thanks to a change in Fashion, and also, of course, to the Historical Point of View, we have largely rendered his book innocuous.†   (source)
  • He turned his mind to the innocuous subject.†   (source)
  • The mere statement of the fact would have rendered it innocuous.†   (source)
  • That which overwhelmed Othello glides innocuous over Candide.†   (source)
  • And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself.†   (source)
  • Already the rather temperate and even innocuous character of Rhine wine and seltzer had been emphasized by Hegglund and all the others.†   (source)
  • We have no Eton to create the self-consciousness of a governing class; we have, instead, clean, flaccid and innocuous preparatory schools.†   (source)
  • He realised, at such moments, that that interest, that gloom, existed in him only as a malady might exist, and that, once he was cured of the malady, the actions of Odette, the kisses that she might have bestowed, would become once again as innocuous as those of countless other women.†   (source)
  • Because a blue-bottle bangs irrationally against a window-pane, the drawing-room naturalist may forget that under less artificial conditions it is capable of measuring distances and drawing conclusions with all the accuracy needful to its welfare; and the fact that Mr. Rosedale's drawing-room manner lacked perspective made Lily class him with Trenor and the other dull men she knew, and assume that a little flattery, and the occasional acceptance of his hospitality, would suffice to render him innocuous.†   (source)
  • In the course of their cohabitation, in Odette's mind, with the memory of those of her actions which she concealed from Swann, her other, her innocuous actions were gradually coloured, infected by these, without her being able to detect anything strange in them, without their causing any explosion in the particular region of herself in which she made them live, but when she related them to Swann, he was overwhelmed by the revelation of the duplicity to which they pointed.†   (source)
  • In this particular case, however mechanical and innocuous it might be at other times, Hepzibah's contortion of brow served her in good stead.†   (source)
  • It might have expressed the state of mind of an innocuous insect, flat in shape and conscious of the impending pressure of a boot-sole, and reflecting that he was perhaps too flat to be crushed.†   (source)
  • One little sip of this antidote would have rendered the most virulent poisons of the Borgias innocuous.†   (source)
  • Dynamite was milky and innocuous beside that report of C25; and even an Oriental, with an Oriental's views of the value of time, could see that the sooner it was in the proper hands the better.†   (source)
  • Yes, or to make them innocuous.†   (source)
  • There was no good way to answer this seemingly innocuous question.†   (source)
  • The adjective remained innocuous for 200 years.†   (source)
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