(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.
Perfunctory
Definition:
(a.) Done merely to get rid of a duty; performed mechanically and as a thing of rote; done in a careless and superficial manner; characterized by indifference; as, perfunctory admonitions.
(1) The apparent lack of "anything to do" can discourage physicians from attempting anything more than perfunctory management of these cases.
(2) Refugees scramble for ways into Europe as Hungary seals borders Read more Habbal was one of at least 16 applicants to be rejected on Tuesday, and he claimed that each person was turned down in a maximum 20 minutes, after a series of perfunctory questions about their country of origin and route to Hungary.
(3) From the peak of potential perfection you descend down through "going to the toilet with the door open", past "perfunctory sex" and into "cold, dead stares across the breakfast table".
(4) The visit though will remain perfunctory, reflecting the troubled relationship.
(5) Instead it pushed through Lord Mandelson's wrong-headed digital economy bill, which only got its perfunctory Commons second reading yesterday, as well as the unavoidable budget resolutions.
(6) Social care is in crisis, leaving half a million frail old people with no care at all, while others get notoriously perfunctory 15-minute home visits or often squalid residential care.
(7) You could never accuse Frank Lowy of not caring enough about Australian football, but in his press conference announcing Postecoglou as coach there was a warmth and an avuncularity that had been missing in his more perfunctory public interactions with Osieck, Verbeek and even Hiddink.
(8) In a brilliant coincidence, he was also there to collect them all, rewarding all the fans who voted on social media with a fairly perfunctory performance of What Do You Mean?
(9) The process for deciding that the war was legal is described as “perfunctory” by the inquiry, while “no formal record was made of that decision, and the precise grounds on which it was made remains unclear”.
(10) These were the days when, other than perfunctory call-ups by prison staff, there was little focus on the motivations behind so-called offending behaviour.
(11) "The North's film-makers are just doing perfunctory work.
(12) Nursing home physicians are often unprepared to make psychiatric diagnoses, and a perfunctory annual psychiatric evaluation is insufficient to manage the complex depression syndromes of nursing home residents.
(13) If this could be attained, the hours in a hospital on rounds or at lectures would be better spent and ultimately, the speaker, too, would derive more satisfaction from his work if he were rewarded with stimulating questions from an appreciative audience instead of the perfunctory applause of somnolent, noncomprehending colleagues, driven almost to distraction by unending cacolalia complicated by lightning speed and rank inaudibility.
(14) Savile was given only a "perfunctory" interview, conducted on his terms at Stoke Mandeville ("not good practice") and with a friend present, about whose status officers did not inquire.
(15) All the approaches to Baghdad are defended by a mix of state security forces and Shia militiamen, most of whom have had several perfunctory days of training before being dispatched to the frontline.
(16) He's saying that the EIB is "part of the Brussels racket"; that BA was a major recipient of the bank's soft loans because it tried to steer Britain into the euro (must have been a bad job); that "everyone knows" that Britain is in a worse economic state than everyone else (oddly enough he cites Brussels as a source) and that our "wooden and perfunctory" PM is "pathologically incapable" of apologising for his mistakes.
(17) The inquiry also heard how Dorrell thought the framework for the fledgling PCC, which was set up in 1991, was "vague", "perfunctory" and lacking in any "real sanctions".
(18) The news is heartbreaking for the families involved and it will be scarcely believable for these hospitals and GPs who are doing their best to deliver services despite the neglect of the government.” He said that Hunt’s statement to MPs last July was “perfunctory, complacent and evasive, failing to reveal any of the catastrophic detail of how 500,000 pieces of correspondence including test and screening results and pathways following hospital treatment, had failed to be delivered and were in fact languishing unopened in a warehouse”.
(19) There’s a terrific documentary about one such case, the Detroit band Death whose sole album was released in a perfunctory edition in, I believe, 1975 and disappeared until a copy of it was digitised and made public on the internet.
(20) Most important, the history and physical examination are often perfunctory and the patient undergoes a number of contrast and imaging studies, endoscopic procedures, and laboratory investigations which may still be non-diagnostic.