(a.) Jumping, or passing, from one thing or subject to another, without order or rational connection; without logical sequence; disconnected; immethodical; aimless; as, desultory minds.
(a.) Out of course; by the way; as a digression; not connected with the subject; as, a desultory remark.
Example Sentences:
(1) Senior figures in the yes campaign were predicting a 60%-to-40% defeat on a desultory turnout, with one admitting: "We were providing a solution to a problem the British public did not recognise."
(2) Andy Burnham Burnham, or at least the Andy Burnham campaign, was making desultory calls on Thursday to test out Labour MPs to see if they were interested in serving in a Burnham shadow cabinet.
(3) A few desultory bands followed, performing an assortment of leftwing songs from various historical leftwing movements.
(4) This came as no real surprise to me; through my desultory use of Facebook over the years I have somehow accrued 362 "friends".
(5) Others surf the internet, update their blogs; make desultory notes; look at each others' notes.
(6) Cafes and restaurants typically close around dusk, with custom desultory and staff eager to get home early on less frequent public transport.
(7) The state was shocked with weapons, money, foreign troops and aid but with little oversight or accountability the results from a long occupation and massive amounts of foreign aid have been desultory.
(8) Nor did he shed any light on how he believed the decision may affect the desultory negotiating process with Tripoli that the UN and the Russians are trying, so far without much success, to advance.
(9) Except for scalp hair and desultory areas of sexual hair, most of man's hair follicles are vestigial.
(10) Bin Laden did describe the obtaining of chemical weapons as a religious duty, and al-Qaida and offshoots did make desultory efforts to build laboratories in Afghanistan and in northern Iraq .
(11) The yes camp, urged on by Clegg, secured a desultory 32.1%.
(12) But there’s a lot of toffs round here, I reckon they’ll get in again because of that.” Though even Clegg will admit victory is “a mountain to climb”, a close second, up from fourth in 2015, would help the Lib Dems test their messaging to Tory voters in preparation for seats they might be more able to win, particularly in the south-west, though the polls for the party nationally remain at a stubborn and desultory 8%.
(13) The series of general frequency shows: driveling 67.9%, desultory thinking 57.3%, withdrawal, broadcasting, insertion 32.7%, loosening of association, gaps, derailment 28.9%, blocking 16.5%, transitoriness, movielike thinking, double-sense thinking 12.0%.
(14) After a rather desultory attempt to overrun the supposed adversary, they discovered that he had claws.
(15) Against this desultory backdrop, it is instructive to note that in policy circles, EPR also stands for Extended Producer Responsibility , the concept that the manufacturer of a smartphone, for example, should be responsible for recycling the handset when discarded.
(16) The military historian and former US marine corps colonel Bing West describes these desultory battles as " groundhog wars ".
(17) In the nonobese group, normal subjects responded to massive hyperglycemia after rapid injection of glucose with immediate and maximal outpouring of insulin, in contrast to a desultory insulinogenic response in patients with mild diabetes, and no initial response at all in moderate diabetics.
(18) The Guardian's report today tells the story of volunteers who were made to pay for their own equipment and weapons, given desultory basic training, then patronised or ignored.
(19) And sometimes, in practice, things can be very desultory indeed.
(20) There are no precise figures of how many Jews left France in 2014, since France does not collect census information regarding religion and is surprisingly desultory about data regarding emigration, but it is probably in the region of around 2% of the overall Jewish population, a huge increase on all previous years.
Discursive
Definition:
(a.) Passing from one thing to another; ranging over a wide field; roving; digressive; desultory.
(a.) Reasoning; proceeding from one ground to another, as in reasoning; argumentative.
Example Sentences:
(1) On the stage, the tolerant, discursive, boulevard theatre in which he had flourished was disappearing.
(2) Chaika and Lambe (1985) counter that it is a speech disorder at the syntactic-discursive level, and not a thought disorder.
(3) The efficacy of using discursively related as opposed to unrelated sentences in elicited imitation tasks is discussed from a pragmatic point of view.
(4) The analysis of their different ways of linking utterances shows difficulties that concern the construction of a common discursive ground.
(5) There were others too, but Sydney and Adelaide commanded the discursive high ground and took shit from no one.
(6) This paper presents a broad discursive assessment of the philosophy and practices of occupational therapy as related to leprosy.
(7) The continuing parochialization of the infantile neurosis to the phallic-oedipal period has been perpetuated in great part by a technical legacy which has tended to restrict reconstructions of the infantile neurosis to the more discursively recoverable libidinal events of that period, and to exclude its preoedipal and aggressive determinants which are more apt to be expressed through the nondiscursive modes of the transference through its acts and self states.
(8) It is a discursive device for summoning the people that you want.
(9) At once discursive and concrete, he only liked "exploring ideas if they were grounded in everyday experience".
(10) Since medicine is itself a discursive formation, a science with both a history, and a future, it is argued that much can be learned by reflecting on the progression of models, or "paradigm-shifts,", in terms of which modern medicine has articulated the human body that figures at the heart of its discourse.
(11) 6.09pm BST Maloney's long and discursive praise at this juncture for Hillary Clinton creates a good opportunity for us to note that Clinton is a likely strong Democratic presidential candidate in 2016 and one of the prickly subtexts of this hearing is that whatever we may find out about Benghazi, it's Clinton's performance that is up for trial and hurting her reputation as a leader could help the GOP regain the White House.
(12) What is striking for those who, like myself, have covered these protests is often how discursive and open-ended they are.
(13) Gary Younge : This did justice to his campaign in the way that the last few days have not It was a battle between the narrative and the discursive.
(14) To change this, several types of individual decision making were characterized, four in the field of intuition (very fast logical decisions, consciously and unconsciously heuristic decisions using special instruments, the deep remainder of intuition which can and should not be the subject of scientific analysis) and discursive (purely logical) decision making as a fifth type.
(15) Against present trends towards the homogenization and the hegemony of one world intellectual "koine," the author underscores the richness contained in the plurality of intellectual styles, discursive paradigms and cultural configurations.
(16) The second was a much more discursive (1,500-word) appraisal of all aspects of US-Russian relations, mostly noting areas of agreement.
(17) The act of conversing, the sense of being in a discursive space, is at the heart of human existence, and prison radio is about carving out a new space for its inmates, not just yearning for the one they've been locked out of.
(18) But Gould was good-humoured and discursive, taking an apparently compassionate view of human nature, and Lewontin, a population geneticist who could show that racial differences are genetically tiny, added credence to charges of racism, even though Wilson hadn't brought the subject up.
(19) Indeed, George Entwistle was appointed precisely because he said he wanted to make BBC culture more open, less command-led and more discursive.
(20) For late nineteenth century women, two significant influences upon their body behavior were: the physical realities of sickness and early death which modified, or curtailed female energy and physical capacity; and the discursive practices of medical experts and scientists concerning the identification and etiology of female ill-health and disease and their agreed upon therapies for assisting women to maintain, or regain their health.