(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.
Hodgepodge
Definition:
(n.) A mixed mass; a medley. See Hotchpot.
Example Sentences:
(1) In Singapore, however, where a hodgepodge mix of ethnic Chinese, Malay and Indian residents actively aim to maintain what the nation's "founder", Lee Kuan Yew, has termed "racial harmony", supporters are hard to come by.
(2) Unfortunately it is also home to this thing – a fifth-tier multi-colored hodgepodge by Frank Gehry, which opened in 2000 and utterly failed to do for Seattle what his Guggenheim did for Bilbao.
(3) The entrance to Za'atari – now Jordan's fifth largest city – is a chaotic hodgepodge of Syrian refugees, Jordanian citizens, journalists, aid workers, vans and water trucks, with up to 10,000 visitors a day.
(4) Iron Man 2 was a huge disappointment, The Avengers (Iron Man 2½) an aimless hodgepodge and The Dark Knight Rises a pretentious, incoherent mess.
(5) The latter is true of the north-east Aegean, which includes a hodgepodge of islands stretching from lush Samos in the south – just off the coast of Turkey – up to Thassos, 400km to the north and closer to Bulgaria than it is to Athens.
(6) If there is a conceptual framework behind all this, it is as much of a hodgepodge as Skrillex's music.
(7) A hodgepodge alliance of US legislators is finally waking up to the need and opportunity to stand up for citizens' rights , but they will be slow and, don't we know, ineffective and often uninformed .
(8) The TV integration is an awkward hodgepodge of menus and overlays and dead ends.