(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.
Haphazard
Definition:
(n.) Extra hazard; chance; accident; random.
Example Sentences:
(1) Poorly-differentiated tissue produced a more haphazard out-growth of pleomorphic cells with few processes and flattened pseudopodia.
(2) Ultrastructurally, however, this material is composed of nonbranching, haphazardly arranged fibrils of approximately three times the thickness of typical amyloid fibrils.
(3) For example, it is not known with any certainty whether the oscillations seen in fetal heart rate are highly organised, in reflection of underlying ultradian rhythms, or whether they are entirely random and haphazard.
(4) A review of 15 well-documented cases of proliferative periostitis reported in the literature and a description of six new cases, five fully documented, have shown the following: a variety of irritants both odontogenic and nondontogenic in origin may induce neoperiostosis in the mandible; radiographically, cortical redundancy and preservation of the original cortical outline are the most common findings; and microsocopically, a fibro-osseous pattern evincing one of the three trabecular orientations--parallel, retiform, or haphazard fibrous dysplasia-like--is featured.
(5) For many years directors of Canadian postgraduate specialty programs have selected candidates in an uncontrolled and haphazard way.
(6) Soon, reformers known as “sanitarians” focused their attention on replacing the haphazard and unsanitary plumbing arrangements in homes and workplaces with technologically advanced public sewer systems.
(7) We postulate that an embryonic rest was incorporated into the spinal canal and, when removed from its normal inducer tissue, grew haphazardly throughout the spinal cord.
(8) The single striking morphologic abnormality was the disorganized, haphazard architecture of the media in these areas.
(9) Canvasses from the UNHCR and Unicef, the children's agency, are piled haphazardly on to structures made out of wood with wicker roofs, sacking and animal skin.
(10) It is concluded that the haphazard and incomplete visualization of the uterine contents at present precludes the application of second-trimester fetoscopy for early detection of visible congenital fetal abnormalities.
(11) Some Tory ministers take the view that driving down the total cost of government and getting rid of bodies is enough – why care if the cuts are haphazard and disorganisation results?
(12) By having all second-year residents together, faculty teaching time was efficiently used, and the haphazard results from relying on faculty-resident precepting experiences in the family practice center to provide training in these areas was avoided.
(13) Pigment cell contributions exhibit no consistent pattern among the four macromeres, and are haphazardly distributed throughout the ectoderm.
(14) These data indicate that the occurrence of MLRs in children is not haphazard, and that the MLR in children can be reliably obtained during certain states of arousal.
(15) The inquest was left with an increasing impression of organisational haphazardness – even chaos – with different agencies meeting regularly but failing to share information or establish basic facts.
(16) The car glides through rolling hills; the camera shows the expression on the boy's face turning from delight to terror; the vehicle veers haphazardly to the side of the road and Théophile is seen leaping out, running to the nearest house for help.
(17) Changes of mechanical activity and coronary blood flow induced by haphazard uncorrelated sequence of stimuli, were studied in the dog heart.
(18) Early lesions of KS were characterized by the presence of dilated vascular spaces haphazardly arranged in the biopsy specimen, a sparse inflammatory cell infiltrate composed of lymphocytes (usually without plasma cells), and aggregates of cuboidal cells with the appearance of epithelioid cells.
(19) Johnson said it was time to stop "making do" and haphazardly expanding existing airports, adding: "We must ensure that the final outcome is not one that future generations will regret."
(20) These results suggest that the ECH in celiac disease is not a haphazard process but, instead, a selective proliferation of certain endocrine cell types.