All 5 Uses
competent
in
Gone Girl
(Auto-generated)
- These messages and orders brought to you by my father, a midlevel phone-company manager who treated my mother at best like an incompetent employee.†
p. 60.2incompetent = not sufficiently capablestandard prefix: The prefix "in-" in incompetent means not and reverses the meaning of competent. This is the same pattern you see in words like invisible, incomplete, and insecure.
- All these will be found by even the most incompetent police departments.†
p. 244.8
- A simple story line: The cops are incompetent and out to get you, it's all circumstantial, if the glove doesn't fit, blah blah, blah.†
p. 314.5 *
- Instead of accepting responsibility for the fact that, if this case had been left in your extremely fucking incompetent hands, Nick would be on death row and I'd be chained to a bed, being raped every day from now until I died.†
p. 380.8
- It would discuss the incompetence of the cops (it was a biased case, full of dead ends and wrong turns, with the police department focused doggedly on the wrong man).†
p. 384.3incompetence = inability to do things sufficientlystandard prefix: The prefix "in-" in incompetence means not and reverses the meaning of competence. This is the same pattern you see in words like invisible, incomplete, and insecure.
Definitions:
-
(1)
(competent) capable (able to do something in a generally satisfactory manner) -- sometimes specifically to have legal capability
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(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) In the field of law, competent has the specialized meaning of being legally qualified to do something such as to be mentally fit to make reasonable decisions; or to have jurisdiction or authority to take an action.
In classic literature, a competency can refer to having an income or assets to support living expenses.