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Haphazard   /hæphˈæzərd/   Listen
Haphazard

adjective
1.
Dependent upon or characterized by chance.  Synonym: hit-or-miss.  "His judgment is rather hit-or-miss"
2.
Marked by great carelessness.  Synonyms: slapdash, slipshod, sloppy.  "Slapdash work" , "Slipshod spelling" , "Sloppy workmanship"



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"Haphazard" Quotes from Famous Books



... else, was young Beryl, superintending her aunt's feverish struggles with paint and powder-jars, frocks, petties, silk stockings, socks, and wraps, snatching these articles from a voluminous wardrobe and tossing them, haphazard, into a monumental dressing-basket, already half-full with two ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke

... pushed it far back out of sight, knew why he again touched it. He did, however, take it in his hand, and return with it to his chair. He drew the chair up to the table and laid the old Bible upon it. He opened it haphazard; he was not a man who had ever studied or loved the Bible; he was not acquainted with all its contents and the story on which his eyes rested came almost with the freshness ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade

... appliances needed to impart the instruction with. He concludes it would not only be of use in ordinary daily life, but especially to those who handle merchandise and machinery. Any one, he adds, who has noticed the clumsy haphazard manner in which boxes and goods are tied for hoisting or for loading upon trucks, will appreciate the advantage of practical instruction in this direction. Probably a good plan, he further suggests, would be to have one schoolboy taught first by the master, and then let the pupil ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various

... the quality of troops, that is, the organization that best assures their esprit, their reliability, their confidence, their unity. Troops, in this sense, means soldiers. Soldiers, no matter how well drilled, who are assembled haphazard into companies and battalions will never have, have never had, that entire unity which is ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq

... subordination to Cronje seemed to make him a more dangerous foe. His capture of the convoy at Waterval Drift on February 15 was followed in three days by a daring raid on a British army with a handful of men. It was an impudent and haphazard enterprise, which would hardly have been attempted if he had been in possession of fuller information, but it was justified by its success. De Wet had been reinforced at Koffyfontein, and if he had brought all the commandos at his disposal with him to Paardeberg Cronje would probably have been relieved. ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited

... Cieldauro; nor that one, likewise, that Desiderius built, who reigned after Astolf—namely, S. Pietro Clivate, in the diocese of Milan; nor the Monastery of S. Vincenzo in Milan, nor that of S. Giulia in Brescia, seeing that they were all built at the greatest cost, but in the most ugly and haphazard manner. ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari

... 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 Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... as they could easily procure their much-loved food. Every night our animals were tied up in various directions, but we found them on the following morning utterly disregarded. This neglect on the part of the tigers imposed the necessity of marching in line haphazard for many hours consecutively through all the most likely places to contain a tiger. Many of the islands were at this dry season separated from each other by sandy channels where the contracted stream was only ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... German governess next year, how she should dress, and in the distance the right school to be selected. Isabelle meant to do her best for the little girl, and looked back on her own bringing up—even the St. Mary's part of it—as distressingly haphazard, and limiting. Her daughter should be fitted "to make the most of life," which was what Isabelle felt that she herself was now ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)

... wheatfield and on the icefield; best and quickest of all in the school, and nowhere so consciously as in the trade union, for all that section of foreigners whom organized labor has been able to reach and draw into its fold. Carried out for the most part in crude and haphazard fashion the process goes on, only in the vast majority of cases it is far slower ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry

... had given place to green-clad bluffs sown thick with cottages of all sorts, from the quaintly hideous and the obviously inexpensive to the bewitchingly pretty and the pretentiously ornate —a haphazard arrangement that ran suddenly into a plot of streets linking a clutter of utilitarian buildings, all converging upon the focal point of ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance

... of the continent, but he filled in many details in parts that had been traversed by his predecessors. This is a convenient point whereat to interrupt the narrative of his life with a brief sketch of what those predecessors had done, and of the curiously haphazard mode in which a partial knowledge of this fifth division of the globe had been ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott

... very pleasant for Patsey, as it united the privacy of a separate abode with the cheerfulness of the family home. She had her own servant, whose excellent cooking and, above all, whose scrupulous cleanliness and tidiness, astonished her after the rough meals and haphazard arrangements ...
— No Surrender! - A Tale of the Rising in La Vendee • G. A. Henty

... grow up in any such carefully tended and contemplated fashion as Messrs. Emerson and Polonius suggest. They begin haphazard. As we look back on the first time we saw our friends we find that generally our original impression was curiously astray. We have worked along beside them, have consorted with them drunk or sober, have grown to cherish their delicious absurdities, have ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley

... man had come. The next night he followed her quite across the bridge, and this time Lurine did not walk so quickly. Girls in her position are not supposed to have normal introductions to their lovers, and are generally dependent upon a haphazard acquaintance, although that Lurine did not know. The young man spoke to her on the bridge, raising his hat from his black head as ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr

... hard here," he ventured, as, noticing the damage that the damp grass was doing to his trouser hems, he covered the remaining distance between them in a series of violent haphazard leaps. ...
— Stubble • George Looms

... this time the resistance of the colonists had been carried on in a haphazard sort of way. Now Committees of Correspondence began to be appointed. These committees were of two kinds. First there were town Committees of Correspondence. These were invented by Samuel Adams and were first appointed in Massachusetts. But more important were the ...
— A Short History of the United States • Edward Channing

... projector of the work had privately predicted, a better spirit prevailed in the camp for some time. But here were five men, only one of whom had had any of the steadying grace of stiff discipline in his life, men of haphazard education, who had "chucked" more or less easy berths in a land of many creature comforts ... for this—to fell and haul birch and fir trees in an Arctic climate on half-rations! It began to be apparent that the same spirit was invading the forest that had possession of the camp; two, or ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)

... them in uncouth fashion past the gaze of the spectator, because, forsooth, he would not seem to make a rarity of them. The subject to be treated, the groundwork to be adorned, becomes the barest excuse for a profitless haphazard ostentation. This fault is very incident to the scholarly style, which often sacrifices emphasis and conviction to a ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh

... Here a long low brick wall edges the road, mellow and lichened; here a double-gabled, weather-tiled building stands next to a patch of old brick painted the newest possible yellow. Somehow the effect is not hideous, and fits with the haphazard, sunlit tiles and whitewash. Chiddingfold is at its best and sleepiest in high summer—a village of weatherworn red brick ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker

... phenomenon in the development of American literature—so prominent as to call for comment even in a fragmentary and haphazard sketch like the present—is the influence exercised by the monthly magazine. The editors of the leading literary periodicals have been practically able to wield a censorship to which there is no parallel in England. The magazine has been the recognised gateway to ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

... cherished independence, and when the Union sent embassies to invite them into the common effort, they rejected them. And when we suggested that in the interests of racial safety they abandon their haphazard colonization efforts that resulted in an uncontrolled series of jumps into the dark, punctuated by minor wars and clashes when colonists from separate origins landed, more or less simultaneously, on a promising planet, they were certain we were ...
— A Question of Courage • Jesse Franklin Bone

... a 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 mind ...
— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester

... as a result a perfectly uniform and marketable article, the Professor uses various chemicals at the several stages of the process. These, however, are not administered haphazard, or by rule of thumb, as has been the case in some processes bearing in the same direction, and which have consequently failed, in the sense that they have not yet taken their places as commercial successes. The Professor, therefore, carefully examines the article which he has to treat, and, according ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 417 • Various

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

... clutched at the garments hanging from the hooks. The cloth gave. The pommel of the Chevalier's rapier hit him in the forehead, cutting and dazing him. He rose, staggering, and indulged in a little profanity which made him eminently human. One by one he gathered up the fallen garments and cloaks. It was haphazard work: for now the floor was where the partition had been, and the ceiling where the bunk had stood. Keys had rolled from the Chevalier's pockets—keys, coins, and rings; and Breton scrambled and slid around on his hands and knees till he had recovered ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath

... Transley's house? Why, of all the little boys in the world, should this have been the son of his rival and the only girl he had ever—the girl he had loved most in all his life? Surely events are ordered to some purpose; surely everything is not mere haphazard chance! The fatalism of the trenches forbade any other conclusion; and if this was so, why had he been thrown into the orbit of Zen Transley? He had not sought her; he had not dreamt of her once in all ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead

... the print of a foot, the smear of a 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 value ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett

... army—or rather armies—was one of dismay. The result was confusion. In fact, no study of the battle can fail to impress the examiner with the belief that outside the redoubt the whole conduct of the Americans was haphazard. Except for Stark's regiment, which itself came on in detachments, the reinforcements dribbled to the field in companies, platoons, or squads. They placed themselves where the hasty judgment of Putnam directed them, or if he was absent to beat up for more troops, chose their own positions and ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French

... that tumbled down here and there an appreciable fruit with uncouth bluster, sentences without commencements running to abrupt endings and smoke, like waves against a sea-wall, learned dictionary words giving a hand to street slang, and accents falling on them haphazard, like slant rays from driving clouds; all the pages in a breeze, the whole book producing a kind of electrical agitation in ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle

... confidence of the winds, and wears their colours. There is a heavenly game, on south-west wind days, when the clouds are bowled by a breeze from behind the evening. They are round and brilliant, and come leaping up from the horizon for hours. This is a frolic and haphazard sky. ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell

... themselves a few questions. How did I get into this place? Remember what dear old Conrad said—WITH YOUR OWN PASSWORD, wasn't it? How did I get hold of that? You don't suppose I came up those steps haphazard and said the first thing that came ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie

... 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 ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans

... successes of the day. The real author of this book was, of course, Washington Irving. When forty years later the book was to be included in his collected works he wrote an "Apology," in which he says, "When I find, after a lapse of nearly forty years, this haphazard production of my youth still cherished among them (the New Yorkers); when I find its very name become a 'household word,' and used to give the home stamp to everything recommended for popular acceptance, such as Knickerbocker societies, Knickerbocker ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody

... as I wandered about haphazard: first, there was the "douma," which is the town hall, where the "golova," or mayor, resides; if you had done me the honor to accompany me, I would have taken you to the promenade of Krasnoia-Gora on the left bank of the Koura, the Champs Elysees of the place, something like the Tivoli ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne

... us 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, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... complications began to be added to the more legitimate worries of a Manchu Emperor. Trade with the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Dutch, and the English, had been carried on since the early years of the sixteenth century, but in a very haphazard kind of way, and under many vexatious restrictions, bribery being the only effectual means of bringing commercial ventures to a successful issue. So far back as 1680, the East India Company had received its charter, and commercial relations with Chinese merchants could be ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles

... coyotes and prairie dogs, with a few herds of range sheep and cattle. Few of the homesteaders were permanent. They stayed their eight months—if they could stick it out—and left at once. Their uneasy stay on the land was like the brief pause of migratory birds or the haphazard drifting of tumble weeds that go rolling across the plains before the wind, landing against a barbed-wire fence or any other object ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl

... did not move. His struggles grew less; he caught at haphazard words; flung them desperately; ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson

... things which might be reached by a study of the best examples, and he found these examples for the most part among the ancients. To confine our attention to the drama, Jonson objected to the amateurishness and haphazard nature of many contemporary plays, and set himself to do something different; and the first and most striking thing that he evolved was his conception and practice of ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson

... chances are he never would 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 of London, he would ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross

... got hold of the delusion that I was studying and working too hard. Goodness knows that what little I did was as desultory and haphazard as it could well be, but nevertheless I stood in great fear of a dissolution of my gray matter. Once it seemed to me that my brain was loose in my cranium and I imagined I could hear it rattling around. I ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs

... cardboard on which she has drawn the outline of a state without the name. The state capitals are written on separate pieces of paper. The cards and slips are handed out haphazard as ...
— Games for Everybody • May C. Hofmann

... run riot is photoplay madness. It must be 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

... the most mediocre understanding are quite sensible enough to select the right implements to carry on any work that they have undertaken. A woman about to sew a fine piece of muslin does not dash haphazard into her work-basket and pick out any needle which comes first, and any thread, coarse or fine, which is handy. She would know very well that her work would be a sorry affair if she did so, and that, on the contrary, she must choose the exact fineness of both thread and needle to sew ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn

... and more rules and regulations appear, requiring greater and greater self-control—such as not playing out of one's turn; not starting over the line in a race until the proper signal; aiming deliberately with the ball instead of throwing wildly or at haphazard; until again, at the adolescent age, the highly organized team games and contests are reached, with their prescribed modes of play and elaborate restrictions and fouls. There could not be in the experience ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft

... banners over the sky. Three yards apart we became invisible to each other. I followed behind MacRae more or less mechanically, though I was, in a way, acutely conscious of the necessity for stealthy going, one part of my mind busy turning over the quick march of events and guessing haphazard at the future. ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... 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, as every schoolboy knows, being the nucleus of one sentence or clause), it has ...
— Weymouth New Testament in Modern Speech, Preface and Introductions - Third Edition 1913 • R F Weymouth

... the instructor. 'You might have rambled over the heath all day in a haphazard fashion without hitting on him. It was quite a scout's bit of work to follow him up. You're coming on; I shall be proud ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore

... current of associations that led her to meditate on freedom, wealth, power; on a career which should at the same time dazzle the imagination and gratify her heart. Notwithstanding the gossip of Paris, founded on no authentic knowledge of her husband's character or information, based on the haphazard observations of the floating multitude, Lucretia herself had no reason to fear that her influence over Lord Monmouth, if exerted, was materially diminished. But satisfied that he had formed no other tie, with her ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli

... alone than he was out of his chair and, descending the steps into the garden, sped gleefully away across lawns and along winding paths, following a haphazard course. But, as he wandered thus, he came to the stables and so to a large building beyond, where were many automobiles of various patterns and make; and here, very busy with brushes, sponge, and water, ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol

... motionless, his arms crossed, in the middle of the road. After some minutes, he turned his head. Reine was already nothing more than a dark speck against the gray of the increasing fog. Then he went off, haphazard, across the pasture-lands. The fog was rising slowly, and the sun, shorn of its beams, showed its pale face faintly through it. To the right and the left, the woods were half hidden by moving white billows, and Claudet walked between fluid walls of vapor. ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet

... 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

... rarely goes empty-handed away. In these latter days the Prince is not so open-handed as formerly, neither does he make so free with his presence, but still it is no difficult thing for any of his subjects to obtain an audience. He will stop a man at haphazard on the road and examine his weapons, and woe betide him if his revolver is carried empty. Every chamber ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon

... the more I feel convinced that nothing vexes people so much, and hardens them in their unbelief and in their dogged resistance to reforms, as undeniable facts and unanswerable arguments. Reforms are carried by Time, and what generally prevails in the end, are not logical deductions, but some haphazard and frequently irrational motives. I do not say, therefore, with Dean Swift, that "there is a degree of corruption wherein some nations, as bad as the world is, will proceed to an amendment; till which time particular men should be quiet." On the contrary, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller

... silent.) It is a remarkable thing, too, that the words "2nd of October," as well as the year, are not written in your father's handwriting but in one that I think I know. Well, of course it can be explained; your father may have forgotten to date his signature, and someone else may have dated it haphazard before they knew of his death. There is no harm in that. It all depends on the signature of the name; and that is genuine, I suppose, Mrs. Helmer? It was your father himself who ...
— A Doll's House • Henrik Ibsen

... the poor can do that better. Is bread a thing to fling haphazard from an hermit's window?" And to those who persisted after this: "To live on charity, yet play Sir Bountiful, is to lie with the right hand. Giving another's to the poor, I should beguile them of their thanks, and cheat thee the true giver. Thus ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade

... what he said, but he kept back the larger truth. Great works, in which the poet speaks ex animo, and the man lays bare the very pulse of the machine, are not conceived or composed unconsciously and at haphazard. Byron did not "whistle" Don Juan "for want of thought." He had found a thing to say, and he meant to make the world listen. He had read with angry disapproval, but he had read, Coleridge's Critique on [Maturin's] Bertram (vide ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... and the study was empty; a friendly-looking room, its simple haphazard furniture unified by the rich colour harmonies of Indian carpets and curtains; while a liberal supply of books, unusual for the country, proclaimed it the room of a soldier who found time for ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver

... answered. "All the arts have their conventions." (Ruth was surprised at his use of the word. It was as if he had studied at the university himself, instead of being ill-equipped from browsing at haphazard through the books in the library.) "But even the conventions must be real. Trees, painted on flat cardboard and stuck up on each side of the stage, we accept as a forest. It is a real enough convention. But, ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London

... I climb from the oracular platform and go down through my own chosen underbrush for haphazard adventure. I renounce the platform. Whatever it may be that I find, pawpaw or may-apple or spray of willow, if you do not want it, throw it over the edge of the hill, without ado, to the birds or squirrels or kine, and do not include it in your controversial ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay

... awake till two, three, or four o'clock in the morning. He was soon undressed; for it was his habit, on entering the room, to throw each garment right and left,—his coat on the floor, his grand cordon on the rug, his watch haphazard at the bed, his hat far off on a piece of furniture; thus with all his clothing, one piece after another. When he was in a good humor, he called me in a loud voice, with this kind of a cry: "Ohe, oh! oh!" at other ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant

... be impossible to give even an approximately complete inventory of the representative places of the Village. I have had to content myself with some dozen or so examples,—recorded almost haphazard, for the most part, but as I believe, more or less typical, take them all in all, of the Village eating place in its ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin

... frankly round at him. She had very keen, lively eyes, and a bright red-brown colour on thin cheeks. The village applied to her the epithet which John's thoughts had applied to Muster Hill's widow. They said she was "caselty," which means flighty, haphazard, excitable; but she was popular, nevertheless, and ...
— Bessie Costrell • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... as snowflakes," says Whitman—a phrase which probably stuck to him from Rousseau; but are snowflakes and raindrops lawless? To us creatures of purpose, they are so because the order of their falling is haphazard. They obey their own laws. Again we see chance ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs

... on in their usual haphazard way, and the colonel did not say a word about disbanding the school. He thought better of it after he had taken time to cool off; but it was not so with Rodney Gray. By allowing himself to be led away by the excitement of the hour he had done something he ...
— True To His Colors • Harry Castlemon

... sequence. I am writing by the light of an imperfect memory; and the work is complicated by the fact that the early days of my sojourn at Sanstead House are a blur, a confused welter like a Futurist picture, from which emerge haphazard the figures of boys—boys working, boys eating, boys playing football, boys whispering, shouting, asking questions, banging doors, jumping on beds, and clattering upstairs and along passages, the whole picture faintly scented with a composite aroma consisting of roast beef, ink, chalk, and that ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse

... 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 little red shoes with ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... 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 ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland

... economic thinking has been weak and futile in the problems of conservation, of haphazard invention, of unrestricted advertising, of anti-social production, of the inadequacy of income, of criminality. These are problems within the zone of the intimate life of the population. They are economic problems, and determine efficiencies within the whole economic life. The ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker

... 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. ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker

... mining has been in progress for some time, and various craters have been blown and sapped out to, and after trench mortars have "strafed" consistently for many months and torn the original surface of the ground to pieces, the actual position of the trenches themselves becomes haphazard. They cease in many cases to bear the slightest likeness to the ordinary trenches of commerce; they become deep gorges in mountains of sandbags. I have sometimes wished that those officers who apparently write home to devoted bands of female ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile

... to waste herself upon a slum like this! How fantastic the accident that had brought such a face to flower in such a spot!—and yet hardly more fantastic, he reflected, than that which had sown his own family haphazard where they were. Was it the ironic fate of power to be always a god in exile, turning mean wheels with mighty hands; and was Cinderella the fable of the eternal lot of beauty in ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne

... used to receive his intellectual impressions in that way—reflected in movements of carnal emotion. He stirred impatiently in his chair, and raised the book to his eyes with both hands. It was one of his father's. He opened it haphazard, and his eyes fell on the middle of the page. The elder Heyst had written of everything in many books—of space and of time, of animals and of stars; analysing ideas and actions, the laughter and the frowns ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad

... they encamp they appear to discard clothing enough for two or three persons, clothing which, though I should not personally like to make use of it, still appears to be serviceable enough. I suppose it is a part of the haphazard life of the open air, and that if a tramp gets an old coat given him which is better than his own, he just leaves the old one behind ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson

... electro-magnetic induction, and magneto-electric induction, or the induction produced in conductors through which the magnetic flux from electro and permanent magnets respectively is caused to pass—were discovered and investigated by him. Nor were these investigations carried on in the haphazard, blundering, groping manner that unfortunately too often characterizes the explorer in a strange country; on the contrary, they were singularly clear and direct, showing how complete the mastery the great investigator had over the subject ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord

... is sure to follow inadequate food. But we must all remember that it is possible to make a great many changes in diet without altering food value, and that there are few diets which cannot be so rearranged as to give a better nutritive return on the money spent than is usually secured by our haphazard methods of planning meals. Saving of waste is commendable and will go a long way, but this is a kind of passive service; loyal citizens ought to be active participants in the food conservation movement, which is a movement to distribute food in the way which shall promote the efficiency of ...
— Everyday Foods in War Time • Mary Swartz Rose

... seemed a hardy, hardworking youth, of an intellectual type. His hair was thick, short, and flaxen. He possessed neither a sorb nor a third arm—so presumably he was not a native of Ifdawn. His forehead, however, was disfigured by what looked like a haphazard assortment of eyes, eight in number, of different sizes and shapes. They went in pairs, and whenever two were in use, it was indicated by a peculiar shining—the rest remained dull, until their turn came. In addition to the upper eyes he had ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay

... 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 golden threads of song—he seemed to have grasped some hitherto ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli

... "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, that she begins to—live. I declare, I haven't felt ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock

... from his reverie, it was to discover that his haphazard course had taken him back toward the heart of Paris; and presently, weary with futile cruising and being in the neighbourhood of the Madeleine, he sought the cab-rank there, silenced his motor, and relapsed into morose reflections so profound that nothing objective had ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance

... usual way to enter the church is by the 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 ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith

... mile, always between the shadows of the high mountains, I was glad I did not live in the Alps. The villages on the slopes, the people there, seemed, as if they must gradually, bit by bit, slide down and tumble to the water-course, and be rolled on away, away to the sea. Straggling, haphazard little villages ledged on the slope, high up, beside their wet, green, hanging meadows, with pine trees behind and the valley bottom far below, and rocks right above, on both sides, seemed like little temporary squattings of outcast people. It seemed ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence

... 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 ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry

... twin bands of steel high above his head, since the uncertain and uneven sinking of the trestle, green timber, and ignorant and careless workmen, with the incidence of accident far above the average, made construction at the best patchy and haphazard. ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan

... was stumped for a moment. Then she burst out with: "There! I'll tell ye. It's 'cause there's some order in the city; ev'rything here is haphazard. Course, there's poor sections—reg'lar slums, as they call 'em—in Boston. But the poor, dirty buildings and the poor, dirty streets, are in sort of a bunch together. They're in spots; they ain't dribbled all through the ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long

... tend to be phonetic and haphazard. Eg Pensanz, Pensans, Pensants, Pensance, and Penzance are all ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew

... is Law. We have given up a chaos-philosophy—the haphazard continuity of events—a cometary orbit, for the world. There are fixed relations everywhere existent: the succession of ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown

... The temperament of the Polish people, he says, is not rational but fantastically heroic. When I recall the personalities of the various Poles I have known (and I have known a great many), I cannot conceive of a phrase more exquisitely descriptive. It makes all your haphazard knowledge about Poland significant and valuable by supplying you with a key to its interpretation. It is this faculty Dr. Brandes has displayed in an eminent degree in his many biographical and critical essays which have appeared in German and Danish periodicals; as also in ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... was watching the ice-cream begin to melt, the portiere was again lifted and the maid re-entered, leading a fat, fuzzy dog. She led him by a beautiful blue satin ribbon, and he blundered along in a haphazard sort of way that was ...
— Divided Skates • Evelyn Raymond

... crown, for the first time in Hungarian history, dependent upon the great feudatories, who, in Hungary as elsewhere, took all they could get and gave as little as possible in return. In all matters of government, Andrew was equally reckless and haphazard. He is directly responsible for the beginnings of the feudal anarchy which well-nigh led to the extinction of the monarchy at the end of the 13th century. The great feudatories did not even respect the lives of the royal family, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... was present; no one representing the law, not even a doctor; only haphazard persons from the street and a few neighbours who had not been on social terms with the judge for years and never expected to be so again. His secret!—always a source of wonder to every inhabitant of ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green

... clovers rewarded their united search, but Eugenia was satisfied. "We'll put them in the boxes haphazard," she said, "and the uncertainty of getting one will make it more exciting than if there ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston

... they assured him, being only too glad to postpone the errand that must come later. They were eager for another tale, moreover, for they were beginning to realize that these were not mere haphazard narratives, but stories with some definite bearing upon the places and people ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs

... manner—indeed, he somewhere or other distinctly disclaims the possession. Yet, irregular as he is in his fashion of writing, no less than in the merit of it, the germs of some of the most famous styles of this century may be discovered in his casual and haphazard work. Everybody knows Jeffrey's question to Macaulay, "Where the devil did you get that style?" If any one will read Hazlitt (who, be it remembered, was a contributor to the Edinburgh) carefully, he will see where Macaulay got that style, or at least the beginning of it, much as he improved on ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury

... reminded him, "played bowls when the Armada sailed. Your Cabinet Ministers will be playing golf or tennis. Oh, what a careless country you are!—a careless, haphazard, blind, pig-headed nation to watch over the destinies of such an Empire! I'm so tired of politics, dear. I am so tired of all the big things that concern other people. They press upon one. Now it is finished. You and I are alone. You are my lover, ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... sitting up and rubbing his eyes. "Who is shooting?" And he got up and felt around in a haphazard ...
— Dave Porter at Star Ranch - Or, The Cowboy's Secret • Edward Stratemeyer

... Nor are the lessons haphazard dashes at the nearest living thing; on the contrary, they are virtually fundamental, whether with respect to their relation to some of the classified sciences, or with reference to the development of thought and power of expression in ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 15, February 18, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various

... the place of the unity of a system, but frequently also in the place of a harmonious and complete creed. Hence the rule of faith is necessary as a guiding principle, and even an imperfect one is better than a mere haphazard reliance upon ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack

... clearness of vision she saw what lay before her—the hurried preparations, the long tedious voyage on a steamer chosen at haphazard, the arrival in the deadly July heat, and the relapse into all the insufferable daily fag of nursery and kitchen—she saw ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton

... The first, as you have truly observed, has its roots in consanguinity or association, the second in a lively hope of future comfits, and either is sufficiently explicable. But the third has its roots apparently in mere haphazard and causelessness, and isn't explicable by any means whatsoever, and yet is far and away the violentest of the three. It falls as the lightning from the clouds, and strikes whom it will. Though I mix my metaphors fearlessly, like ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland

... morning,—shots were exchanged in the lower end of the town between the Germans and the retreating French. Thereupon the usual order to burn and destroy was given, and the buildings along the main thoroughfare were set on fire. The mayor and six other citizens, gathered haphazard on the streets, were taken to a field outside the town and shot. There were other moving and significant incidents in the occupation of Senlis which are well authenticated, characteristic of the German method, but need not ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick

... we can discover these, we shall, perhaps, be able to cure permanently by removing the ultimate cause. At any rate, our remedies will be apt to reach the disease far more effectually than if they were sought out in a haphazard way. ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker

... to scribble these haphazard memories I had designed to be very droll concerning the "provincialism" of Lichfield; for, as every inhabitant of it will tell you, it is "quite hopelessly provincial," —and this is odd, seeing that, as investigation will assure you, the city is exclusively ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al

... from twenty-five shillings upwards weekly. We spoke to some of the wives of the workmen, several of whom are recent arrivals from Lancashire. Their dwellings are of the simplest description, made of corrugated iron or of straw, and scattered at haphazard in a clearing in the jungle or on the banks of the river. These pioneers of cultivation have to lead a hard life and bear many privations—circumstances in which the colonising qualities of the Anglo-Saxon race always come to ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey

... incident during our voyage. We spent one whole night aground in the St. Clair Lake. Nothing I can say will give any idea of the recklessness with which the ship was navigated. To begin with, there were no charts; you went at haphazard, according to information that had come down by tradition, and yet these lakes are really small oceans, with currents, and fogs, and squalls coming off the coasts, just like the sea. The navigation must have been just the same in 1679, when Lassalle, an officer in the ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville

... There was no end to the ringing for some months, and we had three servants who absolutely refused to stay in so bad a place. We had also to contend with letters and notes in the same way, brought to us at haphazard: "Does Mr So-and-so live here?"—"No, he does not."—"Then pray where does he?" This was interminable, and not five minutes in the day passed without the door-bell being rung. For the sake of not changing my servants I was at last put to the expense of an extra boy for ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... the tin and lead soldiers which were part of the shopkeeper's stock. The visitor would have thought nothing of it if it had not been for a certain odd grouping of them, which did not seem either entirely commercial or entirely haphazard. ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... and came from Naples to Rome, his sole outfit being a toga made of a piece of cloth adorned with obscene pictures and a small Asiatic mitre. Like many of his kind at that day, he sold poisons and invented five or six new remedies which were more or less haphazard mixtures of wine and poisonous substances. He had the good luck to cure his first patient, Titus Cnoeus Leno, who, being a poet, straightway constituted himself the vates sacer of his physician, and induced some of his fashionable mistresses to place themselves under his ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott

... and scattered social groups could be called society—small coteries drawn temporarily together through accident of environment, inherited family acquaintance, traditional, material, or religious interest, and sometimes by haphazard ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers

... cash. The book-lined study was in the care of a Mr. Tombs, a gentleman who combined the appearance of a mute at a funeral with the aloof and mysterious manner of a man waiting for his wife in a ladies' underwear department, and the peculiar faculty of making the haphazard visitor feel that he had strayed into a ladies' underwear shop also. "Have you an account with us, sir?" Mr. Tombs would inquire; and on being told "No" would look guiltily all around (as it were at partially undressed ladies) and whisper, "Except to the masters ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson

... and arrived at Craven and his macaroni. She looked surprised, then sent him a brilliant smile, turned quickly and spoke to Lady Sellingworth. The latter then also looked towards Craven, smiled kindly, and bowed with the careless, haphazard grace which ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens

... opposed only to the theory that these Soviets, recruited in a more or less haphazard manner, as such organizations must necessarily be, were better adapted to the governing of a great country like Russia than a legal body which received its mandate in elections based upon universal, equal, direct, and secret suffrage. No one ever pretended that the Soviets represented ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo

... consideration; such ears cannot be too carefully guarded. That, though the occupations named are entirely normal to all well-ordered states, descendants of persons in those occupations tend to become "subnormal"—so runs the cant of it—something handicapped by that haphazard bullet of a lifetime since, fired to advance the glorious cause ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes

... to carry, how to dress with comfort, and how to follow up game, on horseback and on foot, in the open and when in the woods or in the short brush. He has also told us much about the habits of the beasts and birds that he has hunted, showing that he followed the sport intelligently and not in the haphazard fashion of many who go out merely to get ...
— American Boy's Life of Theodore Roosevelt • Edward Stratemeyer

... must be largely of the "hit-or-miss" order. The desired value may be realized under these conditions, but, if it is realized, it is manifestly through accident, not through intelligent design. It is needless to point out the waste that such a blundering and haphazard adjustment entails. We all know how much of our teaching fails to hit the mark, even when we are clear concerning the result that we desire; we can only conjecture how much of the remainder fails of effect because we are hazy ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley

... eminently a matter for public enterprise. Are we to be denied the hope that fir, and spruce, and Austrian pine may conceivably be lifted out of the plane of Party politics? Further, to take instances at haphazard, the State, whatever else its economic functions may be, will be one of the largest purchasers of commodities in the country. It is thinkable that the Irish State may give its civil servants Irish-made paper to write on in their offices. It may even so arrange things ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle

... left in all their primitive irregularity, and decorated here and there with casual dwellings, while the gaps are filled in roughly as time goes on and space grows more precious every year. This haphazard arrangement has no doubt resulted in a certain picturesqueness of disposition and perspective, and even in a tortuous maze of buildings very difficult for any foreign enemy to assault; but it is obvious that the city's internal ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook

... abandoning it altogether as a failure. Nothing is more common than to hear people say most emphatically that vegetarian diet is no good, for they "have tried it." We usually find upon enquiry, however, that the "fair trial" which they claim to have given, consisted of a haphazard and ill-advised course of meals, for a month, a week, or a few days intermittently, when a meat dinner was from some reason or other not available. One young lady whom I know, feels entitled to throw ridicule on the whole thing from the vantage-ground of one day's experience—nay, ...
— Reform Cookery Book (4th edition) - Up-To-Date Health Cookery for the Twentieth Century. • Mrs. Mill

... Softswan had selected was not picked up at haphazard. It was deliberately chosen as being less deadly than the others, the charge being a few slugs or clippings of lead, which were not so apt to kill as rifle bullets; for Softswan, as her name might suggest was gentle of spirit, and was influenced by ...
— The Prairie Chief • R.M. Ballantyne

... three, out of small cows, I have at Christmas got L40 from the butcher. Purity of blood in the male will be found highly to improve inferior races. A herd of breeding stock without the risk of haphazard will be secured at a moderate cost—one that will be profitable to ...
— Cattle and Cattle-breeders • William M'Combie

... haphazard collection of essays Sidelights on New London and Newer York, published on his return to England from the second visit, has a surprising unity. Blitzed in London and out of print in New York it is now hard to obtain, which is a pity as ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... In the third place, there is no possible reward for giving this instruction. Of course, the worker necessarily improves under any sort of teaching, and if he has a receptive mind, or an inventive mind, he must progress constantly, either by teaching himself or by the instruction, no matter how haphazard. ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth

... by carefully systematized organization that great work of this kind can be carried on. The slapdash, haphazard of hysterical excitement can have no legitimate place in a movement that provides stepping stones toward the ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller

... 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 active. In order to attain its full benefits it is ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore

... them by circumstances or tradition, and develop a superior existence. It is a little like the advantage which a comparatively new city like Washington has over an old city like Boston, in being started after it was planned, instead of being started haphazard, without ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske

... average visualization 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

... you'll find folks in this world so blind that they'll tell you destiny or fate, or whutever you want to call it, jest goes along doin' things by haphazard without no workin' plans and no fixed designs. But me, I'm different—me. I regard the scheme of creation ez a hell of a success. Look at this affair fur a minute. I go meddlin' along like an officious, absent-minded idiot, which I am, and jest when it looks like nothin' is goin' ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb

... either House to stand 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 of quota representation. When I met Matthew Davenport Hill I respected ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence

... theory may work too perfectly to fit the haphazard facts of life. There was still the dead man to be explained. And a theory, however perfect, did not bring him any nearer to solving the personal problems concerned. What was one to do with a man who was at once sane and ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner

... settled parts of the country, however, railroad building had comparatively a more solid foundation. Yet the railroad map of the forties indicates that railroad building in this early period was incoherent and haphazard. Practically everywhere the railroad was an individual enterprise; the builders had no further conception of it than as a line connecting two given points usually a short distance apart. The roads of those days began anywhere and ended almost anywhere. A ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody

... respect, of the public, were incapable of finding, either in Vinteuil's sonata or in Biche's portraits, what constituted harmony, for them, in music or beauty in painting. It appeared to them, when the pianist played his sonata, as though he were striking haphazard from the piano a medley of notes which bore no relation to the musical forms to which they themselves were accustomed, and that the painter simply flung the colours haphazard upon his canvas. When, on one of these, they were able to distinguish a human form, they ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... 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 ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann

... been noticed. Possessing but a limited amount of education, the boatswain of the Plantagenet endeavoured, on attaining his present rank, to instruct himself; and having no one to advise him, he had purchased some books at haphazard, the contents of which he respected the more that they were totally beyond his comprehension. The work mentioned was among them, and as he thought that he understood it best it was his chief favourite. He was a short, spare man, with a red face tanned by tropical suns, ferrety eyes, sharp as needles, ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston

... ran to his library, took up half a dozen books at haphazard, and made him read, at the foot of the title-pages, the dates 1826, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... the beginning of the end of much that has hitherto survived the resistless creeping-in of civilisation. If the Balkan lands are to be finally parcelled out between the competing Christian Kingdoms and the haphazard rule of the Turk banished to beyond the Sea of Marmora, the old order, or disorder if you like, will have received its death-blow. Something of its spirit will linger perhaps for a while in the old charmed regions where it bore sway; the Greek villagers will doubtless be restless ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki

... given away as cotillion favours tiny globes with goldfish in them; again she had given a dance at which everybody got themselves up as different vegetables. She was fond of going about at Newport and inviting people haphazard to lunch—thirty or forty at a time—and then surprising them with a splendid banquet. Again she would give a big formal dinner, and perplex people by offering them something which they really cared to ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair

... 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 the name either ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving

... door, and the gathering groups, and the overgrown pathway that winds through the quiet graveyard. So a picture can be true and yet very much like a slip cut from a newspaper. For some men cut thus into nature, haphazard, without care or thought, and produce perhaps a square containing an advertisement of a patent churn, a railroad timetable, and a fragment of an essay on art. Cut carefully and with selection, and you may get a poem which will ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith

... only restless, but also precipitate. Helped by an incomparably retentive and capacious memory he writes at haphazard. He never becomes anacoluthic; his talent is too refined and sure for that; but he does repeat himself and is unnecessarily circumstantial. 'I rather pour out than write everything,' he says. He compares his publications to parturitions, nay, to abortions. He does ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga

... intentions. Entries are kept up for a few days, and then the work comes to an end. These volumes contain many scraps of interesting writing, however, which are worth preserving; some of them are herewith presented in haphazard fashion, with no attempt at order in ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick

... which Longmans' agent secured for his principals in all sorts of places, whither he resorted in 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 by Mr. Thomas Hill, otherwise Tommy Hill, otherwise ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt

... 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 ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt

... never read it. Opening the neat pages at haphazard his eye was caught by a word and a phrase that followed it; and, sick at heart, with white lips and a cold sweat pouring like water from his temples, he flung ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen

... Naturally the center of attraction, the young girl found herself forced to dance often. He, too, whirled around with others, just whom, he did not know; he dipped into Terpsichorean gaiety to escape the dowager's inquisition regarding that haphazard flight from the Nevski and other details he did not wish to converse about. But his turn came with Betty at last, and sooner than he had ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham

... to permit unions to do for themselves what we do on a sentimental, philanthropic, haphazard basis, through our "sweatshop laws," for the miserable, unorganized workers of the ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane

... an art peculiar to himself, in scattered scenes, in haphazard glimpses into the lives of his characters, in seemingly trivial conversations, has succeeded in so concentrating the atmosphere of the Russia of his day that we feel it in every line we read, oppressive as the mists that hang over a lake at dawn, and, like ...
— Swan Song • Anton Checkov

... eyes of the restless and the longing, Providence often appears to be worse than inscrutable: an unreliable Omnipotence given to haphazard whimsies in dealing with its own creatures, choosing at random some among them to be rent with tragic deprivations and others to be petted with blessing ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington

... 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 were taken ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine

... 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

... wheels drew rapidly nearer, and, just as I was expecting them to go whirling by, stopped,—in front of the house. My heart leapt in my bosom. In a convulsion of frantic terror, again, during the passage of one frenzied moment, I all but burst the bonds that held me, and fled, haphazard, from the imminent peril. But the bonds were stronger than I,—it was as if I had ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh

... of strategy almost annihilated, by the fact of Richard Calmady's infirmity and the hard-and-fast order of domestic procedure, the elaborate system of etiquette, which that infirmity had gradually produced. At Brockhurst there were no haphazard exits and entrances. These were either hopelessly official and public, or guarded to an equally hopeless point of secrecy. A contingent of tall, civil men-servants was always on duty. Richard was invariably in his place at table when the rest of the company came down. The ladies took their after-dinner ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... 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 checks from a certain newspaper ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper

... methodical man that ever lived. He had a place for everything and insisted that everything should be kept in its place. There was nothing haphazard about his methods of business. He kept exact ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth

... gloves are bought. I select a pair haphazard, and he pretends to perceive they fit perfectly by putting them over the back of my hand. I make him assure me of the fit, and then buy the pair and proceed to take my old ones off and put the new on grimly. If ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells

... of this common conviction our poets have almost invariably been obliged to make their art a quite subsidiary and haphazard affair, like the rearing of children by a mother who is forced to go out and scrub from early morning till late at night and has to leave little Johnnie tied in his high chair to be fed by an older ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler

... 'Supernatural Religion,' indeed, has not felt the necessity for this preliminary step. He has taken up, as it were, at haphazard, the first standard that came to his hand; and, not unnaturally, this is found to be very much the standard of the present literary age, when both the mechanical and psychological conditions are quite different from those that prevailed ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday

... herself with plain blouses and navy-blue serge skirts that could be lengthened easily. Not that Gwen troubled much about dress at this period of her existence; indeed she was apt to throw on her garments in a haphazard fashion that greatly excited Beatrice's wrath, and would raise a remonstrance even from Winnie. Life was so full of different things, and so many fresh interests and new plans were crowding continually into her brain, that she never had time ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil

... he came to be honoured as one of the institutions of Moher, though the folk considered there was much that was uncanny about him, he was so silent, and he hated the smell of whisky. Now those were the times when Cornelius Desmond ruled Moher in the old open-handed haphazard way, never troubling penniless tenants. But "Corney" died and the daisies grew over him, so the estate was managed by an agent who made short work of paupers, and evicted "Dark" Andy from his ancestral hovel. ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various



Words linked to "Haphazard" :   careless, random



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