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Haphazard   /hæphˈæzərd/   Listen
Haphazard

adverb
1.
Without care; in a slapdash manner.  Synonym: haphazardly.



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"Haphazard" Quotes from Famous Books



... difficult. To begin with, I worked to repeat the phenomena I had seen, getting some haphazard results from the start. My purpose throughout was to exchange intelligent comment with the individual I had beheld on that snow-stone within the Spot; and ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

... things. The opening of day schools of carpentry, plumbing and calcimining for the children of the capitalist is already producing results. Strange though it may seem, one of the most brilliant of our boiler fitters of to-day was brought up haphazard in this very quarter of the town and educated only by a French governess and a university tutor. But at the time practically nothing had been done. The place was infested with consumers, and there were still, so it was said, ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock

... hand and, of course, describing carefully the appearance of a victim's body, the wounds, the position, the expression of the face, any tearing or disorder of the garments. Many times these quick, haphazard jottings, made in the precious moments immediately following a crime, had proved of incalculable ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett

... which the couples were arranged in a sort of haphazard way; the ladies and gentlemen drawing up in two long opposite lines, each then to take his vis-a- vis. But where a lady was in great demand, the gentleman not strictly opposite would sometimes press down and forward, trying to catch her eye, and prove himself her partner ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner

... haphazard type-setting, and trying to interest carriage builders in a new wagon brake, he was also beginning to write. The first and most important of these pieces of writing mentioned in the diary notes—on "The Use of Time"—was sent by Mr. George to his mother, ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various

... structure, too, "The Fortunate Foundlings" is an improvement over the haphazard plots of Mrs. Haywood's early romances, though the double-barreled story necessitated by twin hero and heroine could hardly be told without awkward interruptions in the sequence of one part of the narrative in order to forward the other. But the author doubtless felt that the reader's ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher

... his head against the window, watching the country whirl past, but seeing nothing. He thought imaginatively, and his imagination destroyed him. He pictured Beatrice in the country. He sketched the morning—breakfast haphazard at a late hour; the elder children rushing off without food, miserable and untidy, the youngest bewildered under her swift, indifferent preparations for school. He thought of Beatrice in the evening, worried and irritable, her bills unpaid, the work undone, declaiming ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence

... ran the stream. Fording this, I came amid thickets where was a glory of flowers of all colours, but one in especial I noticed, white and trumpet-shaped. And here I was often stayed by quickset and creeping plants, their stems very pliant and strong and of the bigness of my little finger. On went I haphazard through a green twilight of leaves, for here (as hath been said) were many trees both great and small, some of which were utterly strange to me, but others I knew for cocos-palms, plantain and bread-fruit, the which rejoiced me greatly; and hereabouts I found growing great bunches of ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol

... an interlude the fugitive hoped with confidence to have lost himself in a taciturn and apathetic wilderness of peak-broken land where his discovery would be as haphazard an undertaking as the accurate aiming of a ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... melody in your heart to the Lord." One reason why there is such a lack of power in many churches in this country is due to the fact that the singing is simply used as filling for the services. Hymns are used in a haphazard way with little thought as to their bearing upon the theme to be presented. I am quite persuaded that when the preaching, praying and singing are all submitted to his control, whatever may be man's opinion of the service, he himself will give ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman

... later blunder across the dwelling-place of his silent vendors. At the foot of some rarely-frequented bay he will come on a diminutive village of small whitewashed log houses. It will differ from other villages in that the houses are arranged with no reference whatever to one another, but in the haphazard fashion of an encampment. Its inhabitants are his summer friends. If he is of an insinuating address, he may get a glimpse of their daily life. Then he will go away firmly convinced that he knows quite a lot ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White

... proverb tells us that "our lot is cast into the lap, but the whole disposing is of the Lord." And just as the dark forces that sweep through our life are not necessarily hostile forces but form part of the order of the world, so things that we regard as haphazard, merely cast into the lap of chance, may be divine agents working out a marvellous equality of opportunity throughout our human life. I affirm it without a shadow of qualification, that chance has no place whatever in the responsible ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd

... their plan: they had a map and an almanac, and designed for Grangemouth, where they were to steal a ship. Suppose them to do so, I had no idea they were qualified to manage it after it was stolen. Their whole escape, indeed, was the most haphazard thing imaginable; only the impatience of captives and the ignorance of private soldiers would have entertained so misbegotten a device; and though I played the good comrade and worked with them upon the tunnel, but for the lawyer's message I should have let them go without me. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... with him, I began to see into the laboratory of life where "Casuals of the Sea" originated. This book is valuable because it is a triumphant expression of the haphazard, strangely woven chances that govern the lives of the humble. In Tommy's honest, gentle face, and in the talk of his shipmates when we sat down to dinner together, I saw a microcosm of the strange barren life of ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley

... was amazed at the way these haphazard humans were thawed into a passing intimacy by the sunshine of Thea's personality. For himself, it was the nearest approach to the real thing that he had known since that dear and dreamlike Christmas of 1916. ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver

... methods; so I tried this same series upon a number of normal individuals for comparison; by normal individuals, I mean, at this time, merely anyone who is free from stuttering, and chosen in a haphazard way from the hospital community; for example, one was our executive secretary, another a typewriter, another a telephone operator ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... the boats; the fire hose must be tested to see that it works and is in proper condition; and in thick weather the foghorns must be sounded at regular intervals. There is no such thing now as going to sea in haphazard fashion and trusting to luck. Everything that can be done for the safety of those who travel ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett

... musing, and muttering slowly to himself, "Tut! but a chance coincidence,—a haphazard allusion to a fact which ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... conditions as they occur, without going to their source, but it aims at prevention. It ceases to be simply a reforming of forms, and approaches in a comprehensive manner not only the conditions of life, but life itself. In the second place, its method is no longer haphazard, but organized and systematic, being based on a growing knowledge of those biological sciences which were scarcely in their infancy when the era of social reform began. Thus social hygiene is at once more radical and more scientific than the old conception ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... along the lane, head on breast, plunged in a profound reverie, and following a haphazard course, so much so that, chancing presently to look about him, he found that the lane had narrowed into a rough cart track that wound away between high banks gay with wild flowers, and crowned with hedges, a pleasant, shady spot, indeed, as any ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al

... quest of prey—of the romances in folio in the virgin stamped Spanish bindings, which they might have worn since they lay on the shelves of Don Quixote or the Licentiate, brought for sale, as it were haphazard, to some market-place in Seville or Valladolid in wine-skins. But the contents of the above-mentioned Bibliotheca were purely English. It was a small but choice assemblage of old poetry formed ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt

... no longer held together. Small groups formed haphazard squadrons, keeping each other company, but many ships were isolated and ploughed their way alone over the dreary sea. Many, despite hard work at the pumps, settled lower and lower in the water each day, and at last sank in the ocean, their fate unknown and unrecorded till, as ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale

... emboldened by such happy reflections, the Writer hit upon a scheme haphazard which for sheer unscrupulous impudence would baffle all description; gradually embroidering his machinations with that whimsicality that had always served him so well as an author, until his ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton

... missionary to intellectual indolence as well as to intellectual dissipation. He is in danger, under the pressure of other interesting work and distractions, either not to read anything very seriously or to read in a haphazard, desultory way. The latter is specially a dangerous habit on the mission field. The missionary needs not only to cultivate habits of study and to devote certain hours daily, so far as possible, to that habit; he should, preeminently, keep before him some definite aim or ideal ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones

... wilt thou let me touch and try the state of thy mind by asking thee a few questions, that I may understand how thou art to be cured?" To which I answered: "Ask me what questions thou wilt, and I will answer thee." And then she said: "Thinkest thou that this world is governed by haphazard and chance? Or rather dost thou believe that it is ruled by reason?" "I can," quoth I, "in no manner imagine that such certain motions are caused by rash chance. And I know that God the Creator doth govern His work, nor shall the day ever come to draw ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius

... These letters, taken haphazard from volumes of correspondence on the melancholy event of the time, serve better than the words of an outsider to show the terrible position in which the "magnanimity" of the British Ministers had placed their countrymen. One more extract and ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke

... guarantee of abundance and prosperity therein, as a subtle and indefinable charm spread from the saintly remnants and communicated itself to everything in the neighbourhood.[13] The fairy builders, says tradition, went about their work in no haphazard manner. Those among them who possessed a talent for design drew the plans of the proposed structure, the less gifted acting as carriers, labourers, and masons. Apron-carrying was not their only method of porterage, for some bore the stones on their heads, or one under ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence

... "You say, haphazard, the most Orphic things. There are times when I can imagine you before some shrine making an offering and chanting all sorts of uncanny rites. Of course it is when one has her hand on her own tiller, and is heading for what she wants, ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock

... said once as the day wore on. She took up a volume of sermons that Lady Helena was fond of. She opened it, haphazard, and read. And presently she came to this, reading of the crosses and trials and sorrows of life: "And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, and there shall be no more death; neither sorrow nor crying; neither shall ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming

... the application of remedies. If we are to reconstruct education in order to effect a reconstruction of society we must know our problem in advance, that we may proceed in a rational way. Reconstruction cannot be made permanently effective by haphazard methods. We must visualize clearly the objectives of our endeavors in order to obviate wrong methods and futility. We must have the whole matter laid bare before our eyes or we shall not get on in the work of reconstruction. It were ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson

... after coming to Vendome, Louis became the victim of a malady which, though the symptoms were invisible to the eye of our superiors, considerably interfered with the exercise of his remarkable gifts. Accustomed to live in the open air, and to the freedom of a purely haphazard education, happy in the tender care of an old man who was devoted to him, used to meditating in the sunshine, he found it very hard to submit to college rules, to walk in the ranks, to live within the four walls of a room where eighty boys ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac

... whiling away the interval, she possessed herself of a sister album, one of the many relations stacked against a wall, choosing it haphazard from ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore

... would deal with affairs through a rather haphazard and shifting assortment of stereotypes, if a comparatively few men in each generation were not constantly engaged in arranging, standardizing, and improving them into logical systems, known as the Laws of Political Economy, the Principles of Politics, ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann

... women with their hair in trailing wet wisps and short uneven skirts dripping on the pavements, gaunt children in scant haphazard garb surged across the broad avenue or with shrill admonishments stood in isolated helpless patches amid the swift ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer

... examination of a number of authors (including Scottish, Irish, and American) yields some interesting results. Taking at haphazard a passage from each of fifty-six authors, and counting on after some full stop till fifty finite verbs—i. e. verbs in the indicative, imperative, or subjunctive mood—have been reached (each finite verb, ...
— Weymouth New Testament in Modern Speech, Preface and Introductions - Third Edition 1913 • R F Weymouth

... nature does not readily suggest a design fitting the conditions of a panel her tendency is always towards unity of arrangement. If you take a bunch of flowers or leaves and haphazard stuff them into a vase of water, you will probably get a very chaotic arrangement. But if you leave it for some time and let nature have a chance you will find that the leaves and flowers have arranged themselves much more harmoniously. And if you cut down one of a ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed

... pocketbook she had a tidy sum saved out of the housekeeping money. She was naturally thrifty, and Orville had never been niggardly. Her meals when Orville was on the road had been those sketchy, haphazard affairs with which women content themselves when their household is manless. At noon she went into the dining car and ordered a flaunting little repast of chicken salad and asparagus and Neapolitan ice cream. The men in the dining car eyed her speculatively and with appreciation. ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber

... his soul and body, as he watched his haphazard audience follow him in his moods and changes, ran the quiet magic of Art Satisfied. It is a noble braggart madness, this glorification of a cheap art by an ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various

... special natural shape, is this: In crystals the molecules and atoms are all arranged in some orderly manner. In other substances, substances without special form, amorphous substances, as we call them, the molecules are just grouped together in a haphazard way. ...
— Letters of a Radio-Engineer to His Son • John Mills

... have heard of London; for that would be supposing in a Roman at the close of the first or the commencement of the second century of our aera a geographical knowledge more minute than that of the President of the Royal Geographical Society, unless at the haphazard mention of any particular village in the newly annexed Fiji Islands, Sir Henry Rawlinson could enter into a correct account of its chief characteristic. But if we are to go to the extreme length of supposing that Tacitus had heard ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross

... There was always, if the worst came to the worst, the farm. But if Mr. Gwynne was no business man still less was he a farmer. Tied to his store by reason of his inability to afford a competent assistant, the farming operations were carried on in haphazard fashion by neighbours who were willing to liquidate their store debts with odd days' work at times most convenient to themselves, but not always most seasonable for the crops. Hence in good years, none too good with such haphazard farming, the farm was called upon ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor

... this type. New York possessed thirty different companies, each operating an independent system. In Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, and San Francisco the growth of urban transportation had been equally haphazard. The idea of combining the several street railways into one comprehensive corporation had apparently occurred to no one. The passengers, in their peregrinations through the city, had frequently to pay three or four fares; competition was ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick

... to alter the order of the different voyages. I have grouped together those voyages which relate to the same parts of the globe, instead of adopting the somewhat haphazard arrangement of the original edition. This, and the indices I have added to each volume, will, I hope, greatly assist the student. The maps, with the exception of the facsimile ones, are modern; on them I have traced the presumed course of the journey or journeys they refer to. The illustrations ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt

... that I cannot hear music when I will; assuredly I should not have such intense pleasure as comes to me now and then by haphazard. As I walked on, forgetting all about the distance, and reaching home before I knew I was half way there, I felt gratitude to my unknown benefactor—a state of mind I have often experienced in the days long gone by. It happened at times—not in my barest days, but in ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing

... if it's in existence now, much more than a great deal," I replied. "But I'll read you some of the items set down here—I'll read a few haphazard. They are set down, you see, with their weight in ounces specified, and you'll observe what a number of items there are in each inventory. We'll look at just a few. A chalice, twenty-eight ounces. Another chalice, ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher

... and of another man who seemed to be doing little else than smoke a cigar. I saw the smoke issuing from his lips as he slowly turned his head and glanced out over the water in my direction. It was a careless, unpremeditated glance, one of those haphazard things men do when they have no immediate call to do anything in particular, but act because they are ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London

... careful and painstaking. It is much like preparing a salad or a charlotte russe, either of which can be utterly ruined by lack of care—or too much fussing. The creme marquise is especially difficult for the woman who tumbles things together in a haphazard fashion. Unless compounded just so carefully, it will be likely to crumble, but when done according to directions it makes a cosmetic that is absolutely unrivaled. The other creams which follow this formula are more easily made for the reason that they contain less fats and are therefore less apt ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans

... later they were seated at a small table together, sipping chocolate. There was cold meat, a light salad, and fruit. The conversation was as haphazard and casual as the luncheon, until the pretty countess lighted a cigarette and tasted her tiny glass of Port—the latter a gift from Querida. "Do you think it odd of me to call on you uninvited?" she asked, with ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers

... Professor Hanky, with a well-directed blow, felled him to the ground. The two Professors, fearing that other poachers might come to his assistance, made off as nearly as they could guess in the direction of Sunch'ston. When they had gone a mile or two onward at haphazard, they sat down under a large tree, and waited till day began to break; they then resumed their journey, and before long struck a path which led them to a spot from which they could see the towers of ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler

... were moving toward their crisis for Larry and Ruth another drama was progressing more or less swiftly to its conclusion down in Vera Cruz. Alan Massey had found his cousin in a wretched, vermin haunted shack, nursed in haphazard fashion by a slovenly, ignorant half-breed woman under the ostensible professional care of a mercenary, incompetent, drunken Mexican doctor who cared little enough whether the dog of an American lived or died so long as he himself continued to get the generous ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper

... in this discursory haphazard way while he dressed, he made me feel much at home. For the young dictator—so Mr. Fitzpatrick informed me afterward—either took to you or else he did not, and stood upon no ceremony. After he had chosen a coat with a small pattern and his feet had been thrust into the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... took up a glass as fragile as a flower, careful not to hold it too tightly lest I should break the stem. What should I pour into it? Come now, courage, I say to myself, since no one can see me. I stretched out my hand, and took at haphazard a decanter. It must be kirsch, I thought, from its diamond clearness. Well, I'll try a glass of kirsch; I like its perfume, its bitter and wild perfume that reminds me of the forest. And so, like an epicure, I slowly poured out, drop by drop, the beautiful clear liquid. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various

... remarkable, experiences. It is quite a common occurrence to learn of a thing, say, this morning for the first time in one's life, and then to find, in the course of the day's reading, three or four independent references to the same thing. Suppose we step into the library, and pick out a few books haphazard, just to see if we chance upon any reference ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy

... which is unpleasing. There is a piece of water, which might easily be made very pretty, but it is allowed to turn into a quagmire. But few of the door-yards are neatly kept. The village seems to have been laid out at haphazard. Moreover, their stock is of poor breeds; the pigs ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff

... which haphazard vegetarians so often do, of simply missing out the meat and taking "the rest." Not one in a hundred can thrive on a diet of vegetables, stewed fruit, puddings and bread and butter. Begin right and you will make a ...
— The Healthy Life Cook Book, 2d ed. • Florence Daniel

... the Monroe doctrine as an integral part of our foreign policy, the incident served to illustrate the dangers of settling international disputes in haphazard fashion. In January, 1897, therefore, Secretary Olney and the British Ambassador at Washington, Sir Julian Pauncefote, negotiated a general treaty for the settlement of disputes between the two countries by arbitration. Even with the example of the possible consequences of the ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley

... north doorway, but the more convenient trysting-place is the west end of the nave. Our purpose in the following pages is to picture a morning spent in the Abbey with a party of tourists, who have been collected in a somewhat haphazard manner before a start is made, and are now assembled beneath the statue of the younger Pitt. Although the majority are probably of British and American nationality with a sprinkling no doubt of our colonial brothers, in the minority will very likely be found more than one stranger from the West ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith

... houses built opposite one another compose the street; then the line breaks, and they continue down the slopes and stairs leading to the castle, in a sort of haphazard fashion. ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert

... wisdom they contain are brought together from many quarters by long accumulation. And in the same way the accounts they give of the gods individually and of their relations to each other are not thrown together at haphazard, but are the result of a work of unconscious art which must have been carried on for centuries before it issued in this form. Homer does not by any means repeat all the stories he knows about the gods. He passes over many local myths, especially those of the more repulsive order, which ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies

... her own worst enemy. Her own testimony was the principal evidence presented against her, and yet she denied guilt on one particular upon which the attorney-general had interrogated her. This might lead one to suppose that her answers were the haphazard replies of a half-witted woman. But the supposition is by no means consistent with the very definite and clear-cut nature of her testimony. It is useless to try to unravel the tangles of the case. It ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein

... precarious, so giddily dangerous, as the fabric of the social order with which the men of the opening of the twentieth century were content. To us it seems that every institution and relationship was the fruit of haphazard and tradition and the manifest sport of chance, their laws each made for some separate occasion and having no relation to any future needs, their customs illogical, their education aimless and wasteful. Their method of economic exploitation indeed impresses a trained ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells

... the regular routine of our six children's rooms. At first disconnected stories were told but when we found how much the stories influenced the children's reading, we began to follow a regular program, which has proved more effective than haphazard story telling. Last year we told stories from Greek mythology and Homer and had an attendance of over 5,000 children. The books placed on special story hour shelves ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine

... it was, after all, the result of accident and inadvertence, and a "careless use of terms in drafting an Act of Parliament"; and that difficult and perilous theological questions have come, by "a haphazard chance," before a court which was never meant to decide them. It cannot be doubted that those who are most interested in the Church of England feel deeply and strongly about keeping up what they believe to ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church

... Egyptians guarded Railhead, while the chain of small posts secured the road by the Nile to Akasha. The advanced base grew during the months of April and May into a strong position. Only once did the Arabs venture to approach within artillery range. A small body of horse and camel men made a sort of haphazard reconnaissance, and, being seen from the outpost line, were fired on at a great distance by a field-gun. They fell back immediately, but it was believed that the range was too great for the projectile to have harmed them; and it was not until two days later that the discovery on the ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill

... who succeed and those who fail does not consist in the amount of work done by each, but in the amount of intelligent work. Many of those who fail most ignominiously do enough to achieve grand success; but they labor at haphazard, building up with one hand only to tear down with the other. They do not grasp circumstances and change them into opportunities. They have no faculty of turning honest defeats into telling victories. With ability enough, and ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... and nothing further occurred to disturb the harmony and hilarity of the party—only Errington seemed somewhat abstracted, and answered many questions that were put to him at haphazard, without knowing, or possibly caring, whether his replies were intelligible or incoherent. His thoughts were dreamlike and brilliant with fairy sunshine. He understood at last what poets meant by their melodious musings, woven into ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli

... purposed invasion with a certain haphazard character at the outset, which boded no good to it ...
— Burgoyne's Invasion of 1777 - With an outline sketch of the American Invasion of Canada, 1775-76. • Samuel Adams Drake

... going—rescue those people, or, cynically, at least make a show of action to quell the flood of telegrams. E.H.Q. resisted the pressures in favor of doing a workmanlike job in preparation for a genuine rescue instead of a haphazard show, but ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton

... hour longer the CATAPEZ kept wandering about almost at haphazard, though always getting higher up the mountains. At last he was obliged to stop short. They were in a narrow valley, one of those gorges called by the Indians "quebrads," and on reaching the end, a wall of porphyry rose perpendicularly before them, ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne

... a new election if he accepted Ministerial office. Every elected man was eligible for office. South Australia had been founded by doctrinaires, and occasionally a cheap sneer had been levelled at it on that account; but, to my mind, that was better than the haphazard way in which other colonies grew. When I visited Sir Rowland Hill he was recognised as the great post office reformer. To me he was also one of the founders of our province, and the first pioneer ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence

... Bible has no scheme or plan because it is an almost haphazard compilation of unconnected discourses, uttered on various unexplained occasions, and dealing with many incidents and themes. There is practically no editing, and no attempt is made to explain when, or how, or why the ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various

... the warlike tribes, the work for their advancement thus far accomplished would promptly be lost; for they would instantly offer armed resistance to Filipino control, and the old haphazard intermittent warfare, profitless and worse than profitless for both ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox

... the autumn of 1752 that Goldsmith arrived in Edinburgh. His outset in that city came near adding to the list of his indiscretions and disasters. Having taken lodgings at haphazard, he left his trunk there, containing all his worldly effects, and sallied forth to see the town. After sauntering about the streets until a late hour, he thought of returning home, when, to his confusion, he found he had not acquainted himself with ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving

... on a definite plan, and into a harmonious whole. I wonder how many of us in this chapel this morning have ever spent a quiet hour in trying to set clearly before ourselves what we want to make of ourselves, and how we mean to go about it. Most of us live by haphazard very largely, even in regard to outward things, and still more entirely in regard to our characters. Most of us have not consciously before us, as you put a pattern-line before a child learning to write, any ideal of ourselves to which we are really seeking to approximate. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... jumped, lost a beat, hammered furiously. I looked around quickly. Alderson and Gallagher were the only men I had brought ashore with me. They were digging at haphazard in the sand a hundred yards away. With one stroke of the pick I ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine

... scrap takes place, and a few hundreds or thousands of yards of trenches are taken or lost. To the ordinary civilian mind this all seems very haphazard, but it is not so; every movement is made with a purpose, and the result carefully noted by the master ...
— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester

... nobody. He resembled a man who was secretly carrying a considerable parcel of high explosive. He wandered until he could wander no more, and then he entered a tea-shop that was nearly full of young girls. It was a new world to him. He saw "Mutton pie 8d" on the menu and ordered it haphazard. He discovered to his astonishment that he was hungry. Having eaten the mutton pie, he ordered a second one, and ate it. The second mutton pie seemed to endow the eater with the faculty of vision—a result which ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett

... divided, as it is itself an enormous episode, a sort of Herodotean parenthesis, rather than an integral part of the story. And, as a matter of fact, it joins on much more to the Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes than to its actual companions. In fact, it is an instance of the somewhat haphazard and arbitrary way in which the actual division of the Comedie has worked, that it should, dealing as it does wholly and solely with Parisian life, be put in the Scenes de la Vie de Province, and should be ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac

... the next section, one last volume, taken at haphazard, bears the weird title, A Record in Dark Blood. This work contains notices of eminent statesmen and others, who met violent deaths, each accompanied by a telling illustration of the tragic scene. Some of the incidents go far to dispose of the belief that patriotism ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles

... to the north of Verdun, not far from the enemy's lines at Cosenvoye, and was fairly representative of all the others. The dreary muddy village was crammed with troops, and the ambulance had been installed at haphazard in such houses as the military authorities could spare. The arrangements were primitive but clean, and even the dentist had set up his apparatus in one of the rooms. The men lay on mattresses or in wooden cots, and the rooms were heated by stoves. The great ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton

... knew not how, and afraid to change or modify one iota of their blind belief, investigation, search after truth, enlargement of thought, or change of sentiment, was with them out of the question. The very idea of anything differing from their own traditionary or haphazard belief was, in the estimation of some of them, no less than heresy, treason, or infidelity. Others, who were not so much benighted, were afraid to venture on a free examination of religious matters, or a careful comparison of their views with the teachings of Scripture. Some trusted ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker

... count for much, and they go pretty much as they please. The camp, though not in the least disorderly, was confused and irregular—stores, firewood, horses, cattle, and tents strewn about the enormous veldt, almost haphazard, though the districts were kept fairly well separate. Provisions were plenty, but the cooking was bad. It took three days to get bread made, and some detachments had to eat their meat raw. I think there were not more than 10,000 or less than 7,000 men in the camp at that ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson

... It is as much art in the one case as in the other. To get rid of all visible artifice is, of course, the great thing in both cases. There is so little apparent artifice in Whitman's case that he has been accused of being entirely without art, and of throwing his matter together in a haphazard way,—"without thought, without selection," without "composition, evolution, vertebration of style," says Mr. Gosse. Yet his work more than holds its own in a field where these things alone are supposed to insure success. Whitman covers up his processes well, and knows how ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs

... England; inhabitants of the whole region from Newcastle to the coast, warned by authorities, plunge the territory into darkness, which has the effect of baffling the airship pilot; bombs, chiefly of the incendiary kind, are dropped from time to time haphazard; a Zeppelin, while flying over the Ypres district, is shot at and badly damaged, coming down some hours afterward a complete wreck near Maria Aeletre; a Zeppelin drops bombs on Bailleul, the objective being the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... he began to read, in a piping voice so thin and weak that it sounded just like the echo of some former service—as if it had been lost in the dusty corners, and was coming back in a broken, fragmentary way. It was all the more like an echo because the old clerk is very deaf, and he begins in a haphazard fashion when he thinks it is time for the other to have done. So sometimes there is a long pause, and then you have their two old voices mixed up together, like an echo when it grows confused. It is very strange—gives one all manner ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various

... intelligently exercised else it will fairly run away with the plot, and the result will be a literary wreck. You must study—and hence realize at least fairly completely—the possibilities of your story before you start to write it at all. Haphazard work will never bring you anything—in photoplay writing or in ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds

... are well assured that it is so, because all observation and experiment are found to bear out the truth of the principle we have assumed. All we have learned concerning nature excludes the notion that there is anything haphazard or arbitrary in her ways. We do not feel at all as though the action of natural forces might be suspended or modified for our particular benefit, and hence certain ideas of the efficacy of prayer—e.g., for rain or fine weather—have ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... spin of the ball is a man who means business; and the dilettanti soon let me press through to a stool at the table. Going on pair and impair or the colour was not to my taste. Either luck was going to stand by me that evening, or I was going to be broke; so I planked my money haphazard on four numbers every time, and didn't handicap myself with a system. I'd a distinct suspicion that the bank had even a greater pull than was apparent on the surface; but there was no chance of investigation, and I submitted to the fact ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

... North Shields clings haphazard to the steep bank of the Tyne, and spreads away up and beyond it, reaching out towards Wallsend on the river shore and Tynemouth along by the sea, the older parts by the river looking black and grimy to the last degree; but there is a silver ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry

... knight-errantry. In an instant his well-conceived project had gone by the board. He saw himself discredited, suspected, a skulking plotter driven into the open, a self-confessed trickster utterly at the mercy of some haphazard question that would lay bare his pretenses and cover his ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy

... drill of the men over to me. To drill perfectly needs long practice, but to drill roughly is a thing very easy to learn indeed. We were not always right about our intervals, our lines were somewhat irregular, and our more difficult movements were executed at times in rather a haphazard way; but the essential commands and the essential movements we learned without any difficulty, and the men performed them with great dash. When we put them on horseback, there was, of course, trouble with the horses; but the horsemanship of the riders ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt

... puffed and panted when he walked, and after two minutes in his company Cyril Maude would have played him to perfection. The staff-work of his army was as good in detail as any machinery of war may be, and the tactical direction of the Second Army battles was not slipshod nor haphazard, as so many others, but prepared with minute attention to detail and after thoughtful planning of the general scheme. The battle of Wytschaete and Messines was a model in organization and method, and worked in its frightful destructiveness like the clockwork of a death machine. ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... Sheep and cattle and horses to watch, when buying or bart'ring But a man, who's so useful, provided he's good and efficient, And who does so much harm and mischief by treacherous dealings, Him will people admit to their houses by chance and haphazard, And too late find reason to rue an o'erhasty decision. This you appear to understand, for a girl you have chosen As your servant, and that of your parents, who thoroughly good is. Treat her well, and as long as she finds ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe

... resistance to wrong and resistance to law, and supplied there the yet more disastrous facility of sustaining and enforcing wrong under the name of giving support to public tranquillity. Yet, forcing on its way amidst all these difficulties by a natural law, in a strange haphazard and disjointed method, and by a zigzag movement, there came into existence, and by degrees into steady operation, a sentiment native to Ireland and having Ireland for its vital basis, and yet not deserving the name of Irish patriotism, ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.

... derived from a musical education are proportionate to the investment. Careless work, an utter disregard of principles, in other words, a mere dabbling with music, will afford but superficial results. It is precisely the same with a haphazard pursuit of any branch of art, science, or literature. Through music the soul of mankind may be elevated, the secret recesses of thought and feeling stirred, and every emotion of which the individual is capable made ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore

... conciseness, and the resemblance it bore to those of the books of chivalry. She said that she had many times amused herself reading them; but that she did not know the situation of the provinces or seaports, and so she had said at haphazard that she ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... geography of the British Islands, a selection of anecdotes from the annals of the ancient Jews; no English history, no fairy-tales or romance, no inkling of the infinities of time and space, or of the riches of human thought; but merely a few "pieces" of poetry, and a few haphazard and detached observations (called "Nature Study" nowadays) about familiar things—"the cat," "the cow," "the parsnip," "the rainbow," and so forth—this was the jumble of stuff offered to the child's mind—a jumble to which it would puzzle a philosopher to give coherence. And what could ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt

... as he keenly watched the Doctor's face. He evidently knew the worst, and it was this which had made him seek white help, though of course he was not aware how fortunate he had been in his haphazard choice. He must have been suffering intense pain, but not a nerve quivered, not a muscle moved, while, deeply interested, Joses came closer, rested his arms upon the top of his ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn

... wandered many miles out of my way; wherefore, to put an end to these futile ramblings, I set my face westward, hoping to strike the highroad somewhere between Tonbridge and Sevenoaks; determined rather to run the extra chance of capture than follow haphazard these tortuous ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol

... me tell you this. I have started in to understand this thing. It isn't a haphazard series of deceits, of that I am at this moment convinced. The most amazing consideration to my mind is this: there is system in their fool-tricks. I don't mean Miss Lambert alone, I mean in all the best-authenticated manifestations. As you say, they know how ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland

... gained, except from personal study, of the completeness and fitness of the country houses and farmhouses and of their surroundings, their "flocks of gables," the grouping and composition which through the most careful study arrive at the entirely unstudied and almost haphazard effect, and above all the impression produced that the building belongs to the spot upon which it is built and to no other. This is what makes the English domestic work better, to my mind, than any I have seen, and so well worthy of study, ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Vol. 01, No. 12, December 1895 - English Country Houses • Various



Words linked to "Haphazard" :   careless, slipshod, random



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