All 10 Uses
erratic
in
The Goldfinch
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- The show was complicated to find, and as we wandered the busy galleries (weaving in and out of crowds, turning right, turning left, backtracking through labyrinths of confusing signage and layout) large gloomy reproductions of The Anatomy Lesson appeared erratically and at unexpected junctures, baleful signposts, the same old corpse with the flayed arm, red arrows beneath: operating theater, this way.†
p. 23.1erratically = in a manner that is irregular or unpredictable
- He didn't eat dinner with us or attend school functions; he didn't play with me or talk to me a lot when he was at home; in fact, he was seldom home at all until after my bedtime, and some days — paydays, especially, every other Friday—he didn't come clattering in until three or four in the morning: banging the door, dropping his briefcase, crashing and bumping around so erratically that sometimes I bolted awake in terror, staring at the glow-in-the-dark planetarium stars on the ceiling and wondering if a killer had broken into the apartment.†
p. 56.5
- The Village, with its erratic layout (triangular blocks, dead-end streets angling this way and that) was an easy place to get lost, and I had to stop and ask directions three times: in a news shop full of bongs and gay porn magazines, in a crowded bakery blasting opera, and of a girl in white undershirt and overalls who was outside washing the windows of a bookstore with a squeegee and bucket.†
p. 118.4erratic = irregular or unpredictable
- Boris was the only person I'd told, in Vegas, how my mother had died — information that to his credit he'd accepted with aplomb; his own life had been so erratic and violent that he didn't seem all that shocked by the story.†
p. 281.9
- It wasn't a time when Xandra normally came home, but her schedule was erratic sometimes and she'd surprised us before.†
p. 339.4 *
- — for there was no flim-flam, no excuse, no pre-emptive line with which to meet such a catastrophe; and when I got on my knees and reached under the bed to put my hands on the pillowcase (as I did, blindly and at erratic interludes, to make sure it was still there) it was a quick feint and drop like grabbing at a too-hot microwave dinner.†
p. 398.3
- Casual, but with the unease of a parent wondering if an erratic teenager is really going to be okay taking the car out.†
p. 607.5
- Somewhat erratically —I was dying for a drink; it had been foolish of me not to stop at the bar on the way over — I explained.†
p. 628.4erratically = in a manner that is irregular or unpredictable
- He was speaking very fast and erratically, so fast he could barely get the words out, and his eyes were flat and staring.†
p. 682.7
- I haven't written it from memory: that blank notebook my English teacher gave me all those years ago was the first of a series, and the start of an erratic if lifelong habit from age thirteen on, beginning with a series of formal yet curiously intimate letters to my mother: long, obsessive, homesick letters which have the tone of being written to a mother alive and anxiously waiting for news of me, letters describing where I was "staying" (never living) and the people I was "staying with," letters detailing exhaustively what I ate and drank and wore and watched on television, what books I read, what games I played, what movies I saw, things the Barbours did and said and things Dad and Xandra†
p. 763.5erratic = irregular or unpredictable
Definitions:
-
(1)
(erratic) irregular or unpredictable
- (2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)