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Sporadic   Listen
adjective
Sporadic  adj.  Occurring singly, or apart from other things of the same kind, or in scattered instances; separate; single; as, a sporadic fireball; a sporadic case of disease; a sporadic example of a flower.
Sporadic disease (Med.), a disease which occurs in single and scattered cases. See the Note under Endemic, a.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Sporadic" Quotes from Famous Books



... attacks and counterattacks on a small scale started on the Biala, as far back as April 4, 1915, Dmitrieff and his staff regarded this activity on the Austrians part as merely a continuation of the sporadic assaults they had grown accustomed to. Besides holding his own, Dmitrieff had on several occasions been able to assist Brussilov on his left. Until the big German drive commenced they had only been opposed to ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan

... remember that long talk we had last winter, after the annual meeting of the Feathered Friends' League, and how we agreed that those sporadic doles could do no real good—must even degrade the birds who received them—and that we had no right to meddle in what ought to be done by ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm

... a certain part of nature and not with all of it. We are thus led, sometimes to an "epiphenomenalism" that associates consciousness with certain particular vibrations and puts it here and there in the world in a sporadic state, and sometimes to a "monism" that scatters consciousness into as many tiny grains as there are atoms; but, in either case, it is to an incomplete Spinozism or to an incomplete Leibnizianism that we come back. Between this conception of nature and Cartesianism ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson

... itself may be traced in the growing demand for co-operation in the missionary task of the Church. This demand has no doubt arisen in part through the changes in the means of transport and communication which have made the world a smaller place. Missionary effort is less sporadic than it was. The Churches are developing a Weltpolitik. The exact proportions of the task before them are now more clearly grasped. The difficulty of overtaking the task even when united, and the impossibility of discharging it effectively ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various

... to allow us to doubt that water in some form is very generally connected with volcanic operations; but it does not follow that it was necessary to the original formation of volcanic vents, whether linear or sporadic. If this were so, the extinct volcanoes of the British Isles would still be active, as they are close to the sea-margin, and no volcano would now be active which is not near to some large sheet of water. But Jorullo, one of the great active volcanoes of Mexico, lies no less than ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull

... year came sporadic symptoms of unrest;—strikes, unwarranted confiscations by Government, increasingly bad service in public utilities controlled by Government, loose talk in a contemptible Congress, looser gabble among those who witlessly lent themselves to German ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers

... in Indian Territory through May and June had been, as already described, confined to sporadic demonstrations against Federal herds and Federal supply trains, all having for their main object the dislodgment of Phillips from Fort Gibson. What proved to be their culmination and the demonstration most energetically ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel

... Pollen sterility is not sporadic in a given individual: it is uniform throughout the flowering branches. The individual flowers are arranged on the catkin axis as in the normal flowers (Fig. 5). But when the flowers open, a hand lens reveals 3-5 tiny, membranous perianth-segments for each ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various

... sepulchers of this type after their return from the East. Those in Ashland and some other counties, as is well known, mark the location of villages of this tribe. Those along the Ohio, which are chiefly sporadic, are probably Shawnee burial places, and older than those of the Delawares. The bands of the Shawnees which settled in the Scioto Valley appear to have ...
— The Problem of Ohio Mounds • Cyrus Thomas

... much value. This is partly the reason why the ordinary good-natured bourgeois, who can complacently pass on by the other side after casting a careless look on the most fiendish and organised cruelty in satisfaction of the economic craving—gain—is galvanised into a frenzy of indignation at some sporadic case of real or supposed ill-usage perpetrated in satisfaction of some bizarre form of the animal craving—lust. Until people can be got to discuss this subject in the white light of physiological and pathological investigation rather ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker

... the very appearance of digression in these annals prevents my referring to various sporadic Irish combinations of the 18th century—Whiteboys, Steelboys, Oakboys, Peep-o'-day Boys, Defenders—some Catholic, some Protestant, some mixed; but each representing an inarticulate protest against agrarian ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... might also be advanced, it seems to me, against M. Bergson's theory. Were the theory of life here defended true, it would not only enable us to account for life in a satisfactory manner, but it would render clear many obscure and sporadic phenomena which the current theories are quite incapable of explaining (and hence often ignore!); and it would also practically assure us continuity of life beyond the grave—after the dissolution ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington

... is the equivalent of $20.6718 per troy ounce of fine metal; an eagle weighs, therefore, 2580 grains. The real value, however, is reckoned by a different and a more accurate standard, namely, the labor of man, and this, the sporadic finds of placer gold excepted, has not changed much in two thousand years or more. The increased production has scarcely equalled the demand for the metal; moreover, the longer a mine is worked the greater becomes the expense ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway

... down the paper and fixed the young man with the gray, unsheathed keenness that had sent so many witnesses grovelling to the naked truth. "No doubt whatever. I always held, and so did both the physicians, that his lack of balance was a temporary and sporadic thing, brought on by overwork—and certain unhappy conditions of his life. There has never been any such taint in our branch ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various

... landlord. The sign of the inn is an empty board save for a hat and boots, and the name is the title of this story. The landlord is a short and corpulent little man with a nose of cylindrical proportions, wiry hair, and a sporadic rosiness of visage. Drink generously, and he will tell you generously of all the things that happened to him after that time, and of how the lawyers tried to do him out of the treasure found ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells

... that horses have no intelligence, but a team that knows enough to take in a sporadic case of buggy sparking has got sense. These teams come high, but the boys have to ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck

... settled for the night. The well-ordered beds of the daytime were chaotic now, torn apart by tossing figures. The night was hot and an electric fan hummed in a far corner. Under its sporadic breezes, as it turned, the ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... movement is often amorphous and sporadic, but always spontaneous. It not only appears simultaneously in various countries, but manifests itself in widely separated groups in the same country; in every city it embraces the "smart set" and the hard-driven working women; sometimes it is sectarian and dogmatic, at others philosophic ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor

... aided, by forcing the English to send reinforcements across St. George's Channel. After seeing the slaughter which had taken place, he was rejoiced at heart that the rising had commenced before he joined it, and was in no way the result of his mission, but was one of the sporadic insurrections which frequently broke out in Ireland, only to be instantly ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty

... of the separate poems, where there is a never-failing touch of grace and of distinction. The Philip Sydneys are quite as important as the Miltons, perhaps they are as great. Some poets seem to achieve an expression in a certain cyclic or sporadic career of their fancy, touching on this or that form, illuminating with an elusive light the various corners of the garden. Their individual expression lies in the ensemble of these touches, rather than in ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp

... all republished by kind permission of the Editor of the DAILY NEWS, in which paper they appeared. They amount to no more than a sort of sporadic diary—a diary recording one day in twenty which happened to stick in the fancy—the only kind of diary the author has ever been able to keep. Even that diary he could only keep by keeping it in public, for bread and cheese. But trivial as are the topics they are not utterly without a connecting ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton

... eventually schrecklichkeit saved both the conqueror and the conquered bloodshed and trouble; for if the enemy were not so impressed with the fact that all resistance was utterly useless, he would resort to the sporadic risings which would entail more slaughter on both sides. Zu Pfeiffer, acting on the teachings of the German masters, sought to make war psychologically as well as militarily, economically as well as geographically. ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle

... of my departure dealings between the various clans were purely commercial and of a sporadic nature. Old enmities were not forgotten, and it was considered more prudent to have as little as possible to do with ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan

... intense earnestness of enquiry, but there came times when she, even, receded beyond his conscious thoughts. At one moment, for example, he found they were traversing the religious quarter, for the easy transit about the city afforded by the moving ways rendered sporadic churches and chapels no longer necessary—and his attention was vividly arrested by the facade of ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells

... Rhetoric and the Drama of Conversation both struggled on in sporadic survivals throughout the first half of the nineteenth century; and during this period the methods of the platform actor and the parlor actor were consistently maintained. The actor of the "old school," as we are now fond of calling him, was compelled by the physical conditions of the theatre to ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton

... thought Trennahan, all things should be stable in this land of dreaming nature. He had been told since his arrival that everything had been in a rut since the great Bonanza plague; but assuredly this archaic repose must be its natural atmosphere; its fevers must always be sporadic and artificial. ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... detours from the path of duty that had helped to win for Celestina her pseudonym of "easy goin'." Perhaps this very vagrant quality in her nature was what had aided her in so thoroughly sympathizing with Willie in his sporadic outbursts of industry. For Willie was not a methodical worker any more than was Celestina. There were intervals, it is true, when he toiled steadily, feverishly, all day long and far into the night, forgetting either to eat or sleep; then would follow days together when he simply pottered about, ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett

... cataclysmic violence, the Vorkulian phalanx flew—straight north. The equatorial regions, considerably hotter than the poles, were traversed with practically no change in scenery—it was a world of steaming fog, of jungle, of hot water, of boiling, spurting mud, and of volcanoes. Not of such mild and sporadic volcanic outbreaks as we of green Terra know, but of gigantic primordial volcanoes, in terrifyingly continuous performances of frightful intensity. Due north the Vorkulian spearhead was hurled, before the ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith

... primarily belonging to localities where large game, such as deer and wild-turkeys, is found, has spread down to the cities, where it breaks out in a sporadic form about Christmas. But the hills are its home—the foot-hills, notably, of the Appalachian range, the domestic turkey not being very common higher up, nor its wild original ("original," we insist, pace the Agricultural Report ornithologist, who finds an ineffaceable distinction ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various

... aloof, smoking his pipe, and wondering whether he could invent a motor perambulator which could run on rails round a small garden, fill the baby's lungs with air, and save the British Army from the temptation of nursery-maids. His sporadic discourse on the subject perplexed ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke

... that inundated large sections of the country and destroyed much property, the dry San Diego River getting out of bounds and carrying away bridges and floating houses on its banks. But it has been as dry as a highway ever since. It is clear that when the big rains do come they are more sporadic ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs

... desires "is mine," and tears, and even blows ensue before amicable adjustment can be made. And so through the hours of a kaleidoscopic day, the emotional pendulum keeps swinging from love to anger, from pride to humility, from selfishness to sporadic and angelic bits of generosity. What is the significance of it all in ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux

... beach was no inconsiderable one, consisting as it did of a long, sandy path, upon which a sporadic and tangled growth that bordered it on either side made frequent and unexpected inroads. There were acres of yellow camomile reaching out on either hand. Further away still, vegetable gardens abounded, with frequent small plantations of orange or lemon trees intervening. ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin

... spread from one centre of distribution here and another centre there. The country was in patches: great areas where the Food was still to come, and areas where it was already in the soil and in the air, sporadic and contagious. It was a bold new motif creeping in among ancient ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells

... they had that day received a streaky coat of a gilding preparation which exhaled the olfactory vehemence mentioned. Their present station was temporary, their purpose, as obviously, to dry; and they were doing some incidental gilding on their own account, leaving blots and splashes and sporadic little round footprints ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington

... was no talk at all, save for sporadic outbursts, and the blue smoke and the brown curled up slowly in undisturbed drifts toward the ceiling until a bright halo formed around the gasoline lamp. A childish thought came to Bard that where the smoke was so thick the fire could not be ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand

... of open land to the south, which would go to make some new subdivision of the sprawling city. Absorbed, charmed, grimly content with the abominable desolation of it all, he stood and gazed. No evidence of any plan, of any continuity in building, appeared upon the waste: mere sporadic eruptions of dwellings, mere heaps of brick and mortar dumped at random over the cheerless soil. Above swam the marvellous clarified atmosphere of the sky, like iridescent gauze, showering a thousand harmonies of metallic colors. Like a dome of vitrified glass, it shut down on the illimitable, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... prevailing in Virginia during Patrick Henry's early years was extremely simple. It consisted of an almost entire lack of public schools, mitigated by the sporadic and irregular exercise of domestic tuition. Those who could afford to import instruction into their homes got it, if they desired; those who could not, generally went without. As to the youthful Patrick, he and education never took kindly to each other. From ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler

... been done by amateurs and outsiders. They have, perhaps, certain advantages, as being less afraid to strike into original paths, and even the originality of ignorance is not always, though it may be in nine cases out of ten, a name for fresh blundering. But if sporadic English writers have now and then hit off valuable thoughts, there can be no doubt that we have had a heavy price to pay. The comparative absence of any class, devoted, like German professors, to a systematic and combined attempt to spread the borders ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen

... succeed, however, in carrying his reforms from the stage of sporadic action to a systematic reorganization of the country, and he also failed to enlist the elements needed for this as for all other administrative work, so that the good start soon degenerated ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard

... He had seen a dozen sporadic strikes in this district, and many a dozen young strikers, homeless, desolate, embittered, turning their disappointment on him. "We might support you with our funds, you say—we might go on doing it, even while the company ran the mine with scabs. But where would ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair

... in the enterprise will, of course, lose their money, and I shall therefore decline to accept the very handsome fee which they had offered me for my services. But the main feature, the real point of interest in this matter remains. Here we have undoubtedly a sporadic deposit—what miners call a pocket—of pure gold in a Devonian formation of the post-tertiary period. This once established, we must revise our entire theory of the distribution of igneous and aqueous rocks. In fact, I am already getting notes together for ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock

... essence of it, very slow and tender and with an accompaniment of pum, pum. Pathetically cheerful that pum, pum, hopelessly cheerful indeed against the dirge of the air, a dirge accentuated by sporadic vocalisation. But to young ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells

... of British prisoners whom Major Bach singled out for especially harsh and brutal treatment. The invincible High Seas Fleet upon one of its sporadic ventures into salt water during the very earliest days of the war, stumbled across a fleet of Grimsby trawlers unconcernedly pursuing their usual peaceful occupation. The whole of the fishermen were made prisoners and were dispatched ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney

... in the great movement of twenty years ago the party of Free Silver. The Democrats are also the party of the Irish; and the stones they throw at Trusts are retorted by stones thrown at Tammany. It is easy to see all these things as curiously sporadic and bewildering; but I am inclined to think that they are as a whole more coherent and rational than our own old division of Liberals and Conservatives. There is even more doubt nowadays about what is the connecting link between the different items in ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton

... those which are never so propagated. This general result I shall only support by the authority of Dr. Ramsbotham, who gives, as the result of his experience, that the same symptoms belong to what he calls the infectious and the sporadic forms of the disease, and the opinion of Armstrong in his original Essay. If others can show any such distinction, I leave it to them to do it. But there are cases enough that show the prevalence of the disease among the patients of a single practitioner ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... edited by all of us) were fairly familiar with the subject, and we believed it would subserve no useful purpose to tackle it along the "Shame of the Cities" lines. We agreed that the way to approach Pittsburg was to consider what had happened there, not as a sporadic outburst, but as an economic symptom. Whom could we get that was far enough from the controversies involved to treat the subject objectively and with a big perspective? Brand Whitlock. The Mayor of Toledo knows more about cities and their governments, and the evils that ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine

... law an industrial code that will minimize the exploitation of the weak by the strong, bringing a good measure of security and comfort to all, and such outrages as those of the McNamara brothers will cease, or at worst will be merely sporadic and generally condemned. Allow present conditions to drift on without sharp legal guidance, and such outrages will certainly become more and more numerous. The alternative that confronts the modern world is plainly ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake

... at his sporadic hair— She knew his hymns by rote; They longed to dine together At Casey's table d'hote; Alas, that Fortune's "hostages"— But let us draw a screen! He dared not call her Katie; How could ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field

... the verb "to be able," posse, could not stand its ground, and ultimately became potere in vulgar Latin. In one respect in the inflectional forms of the verb, the purist was unexpectedly successful. In comedy of the third and second centuries B.C., we find sporadic evidence of a tendency to use auxiliary verbs in forming certain tenses, as we do in English when we say: "I will go," "I have gone," or "I had gone." This movement was thoroughly stamped out for the time, and does not reappear ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott

... systematic investigations of Dr. Seligmann and to the sporadic observations of missionaries, government officials and travellers, we have a good general knowledge of many of the peoples of the eastern coast of the south-eastern peninsula of New Guinea, and of some of the islands from the Trobriands ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson

... interest. Their welfare was of genuine moment to him; though wherefore, he could not himself have said. Probably this form of communion with his fellow-beings satisfied the hunger for social intercourse without which man cannot exist as man. And by degrees his memoirs—the continuation of a sporadic journal long kept up, which was, however, merely a mass of disconnected thoughts, flashes of perception, remarks on personal events, and endless reflections on the unrevealed Alpha and Omega of life—began to be filled with other matter: chapter after chapter containing nothing ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter

... imminent danger of literal rupture or explosion, or liable to end in sudden apoplectic seizures, or, in case of a too healthy and active digestion, liable, owing to a lack of a correspondingly active condition of the excretory organs, to go off in uraemic coma. This sporadic and fitful feasting has no perceptible effect on the Indian, who either simply works it off in exercise, or sleeps it off in a long and prolonged period of sleep, during which his lungs work with the deep and steady pull and persistence that a tug-boat exhibits when towing in a large ship ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... the very time of Prince Henry himself; his first voyage was in 1412. De Bethencourt died in 1425, and it is quite needless to follow out at length the stories, however interesting, of sporadic navigation in other parts of the European Seas. Between 1380-95 the Venetian Zeni sailed in the service of Henry Sinclair, Earl of the Orkneys, to Greenland, and brought back fisher stories, which read like those of Central America, of its man-eating Caribs ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley

... menagerie, where an exceedingly fine young woman was wont nightly to place her head within a lion's mouth for the delectation, and to the enthusiastic admiration of Judaea, and all the region round about. There were smoking-concerts galore—more or less good of their kind—and, failing sporadic forms of pastime, there were numerous bars—and barmaids, all of which counted for something in the relaxation of the forty thousand inhabitants of Johannesburg—mostly brokers. We are forgetting. There were other phases of nocturnal excitement, more or less ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford

... tinkling terror, because it tells you of the sudden deaths of men and women that you knew intimately, and the prickly heat covers you with a garment, and you sit down and write: "A slight increase of sickness is reported from the Khuda Janta Khan District. The outbreak is purely sporadic in its nature, and, thanks to the energetic efforts of the District authorities, is now almost at an end. It is, however, with deep regret we ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... with the Mino, it is the desire to bring this female cat into a pure stable equilibrium, a transcendent and abiding RAPPORT with the single male. Whereas without him, as you see, she is a mere stray, a fluffy sporadic bit of chaos. It is a volonte de pouvoir, if you like, a will to ability, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... realize the presence of other and commoner forms of impurity, the self-defilement which taints the moral nature and stimulates the lower nature into unhealthy and abnormal activity. They do not understand the essentially sporadic nature of the evil—that it may exist "as a pestilence that walketh in darkness" in one boarding-school, while another, owing to the influence of a good set of boys, is comparatively free from it; and they will, therefore, take a single denial of its existence, possibly ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins

... an ordinary incident of war is an affront to civilization, and as it is symptomatic of the Prussian occupation of Belgium and not a sporadic incident, it acquires a significance which justifies a full recital of this black chapter of Prussianism. It illustrates the reign of terror which has existed in Belgium ...
— The Case of Edith Cavell - A Study of the Rights of Non-Combatants • James M. Beck

... sins of the fathers, but those of the most distant relations, those of neighbors, of fellow-tribesmen, of fellow-citizens, have been visited upon those whose sole guilt lay in such a connection with the directly guilty parties. This is not a sporadic phenomenon. Among the ancient Hebrews, in Babylonia, in Greece, in the later legislation of Rome, in medieval and even in modern Europe, the principle of collective responsibility has been accepted and has seemed acceptable. Asia, Africa and Oceania have cast votes for it. So have the Americas. ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton

... for Labrador, whom we had been influential in bringing out from England, decided to start an undenominational boarding-school on his section of the coast, we began to hope that we might yet live to see our sporadic effort become a policy. Laymen in St. John's, led by the Rev. Dr. Edgar Jones, a most progressive clergyman, sympathized in dollars, and we were able to back the effort. A splendid volunteer head teacher will arrive in the spring to begin work. The effort ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

... Lollards at home and Hussites abroad before Luther came into the world. The changes did not begin in 1485, or in any particular year. In Italy the intellectual movement had already long been active, and had indeed produced its best work; outside of Italy, its appearances had been quite sporadic. At that date, the Ocean movement was in its initial stages. There had been foreshadowings of the Reformation; and, to speak metaphorically, the castles which had maintained the power of the nobility, overshadowing the gentry and the burghers, were already in ruins. But the fame of every ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes

... believer in at least sporadic female genius, his position on the question of championing the entire sex is at least equivocal. In The Two Poets of Croisic he deals with the eighteenth century in France, where the literary woman came so gloriously ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... pompous affair, largely attended, for although spring was well advanced, the usual May hegira to the country or the coast had not yet commenced. Industrial conditions in and around the city were too disturbed for the large employers to get away, and following Lent there had been a sort of sporadic gayety, covering a vast uneasiness. There was to be no ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... Solar System there are a large number of problems that interest us. What is the size, mass, and distance of each of the planets? What satellites, like our Moon, do they possess? What are their temperatures? And those other, sporadic members of our system, comets and meteors, what are they? What are their movements? How do they originate? And the Sun itself, what is its composition, what is the source of its heat, how did it originate? Is it ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson

... which at the end of the xvth century began to infect Europe, is ignored by The Nights. I do not say it actually began: diseases do not begin except with the dawn of humanity; and their history, as far as we know, is simple enough. They are at first sporadic and comparatively non-lethal: at certain epochs which we can determine, and for reasons which as yet we cannot, they break out into epidemics raging with frightful violence: they then subside into the endemic state and lastly they return to the milder sporadic ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... thinks that the ancient "forest of Africa" was composed chiefly of olive plantations, and proofs of the former abundance of these trees can be found in certain local names, such as Jebel Zitouna—the Mount of Olives—clinging to localities where not a tree is now visible; there are also sporadic oleasters growing near many Roman ruins. Strong evidence; and still stronger is this: that Roman oil-presses have actually been found, buried in the desert sand. Up to a short time ago the Arabs deliberately destroyed the olives, to avoid paying the tax on them; the French have changed ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas

... the 9th of October until Monday the 12th so little occurred that a narrative of the events can be given in a few words. There has been the usual sporadic shelling of our trenches which has resulted in but little harm, so well dug in are our men, and on the night of the 10th the Germans made yet a fresh assault, supported by artillery fire, against the point which has all along attracted most ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various

... their habits, as though they were living in different islands. The people on the eastern side have always strongly opposed anything approaching governmental cohesion with the other side. Moreover, for many years past, the south-eastern district of Negros Island has been affected by sporadic apparitions of riotous religious monomaniacs called Santones (vide p. 189). These conditions, therefore, favoured the nefarious work of the cunning Tagalog and Panay refugees, who found plenty of plastic material ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... not need the buckskin—we already had two in the pack. Our ordinary procedure would have been to dry the hide for future treatment by a Mexican, at a dollar a hide, when we should have returned home. But, as I said, we were afflicted by sporadic activity, and wanted ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White

... outrages were traced home to the perpetrators. For some years the organisation flourished in spite of the efforts of the United States government and of the better classes of the community in the South. Eventually, in the year 1869, the movement rather suddenly collapsed, although there have been sporadic outbreaks of the same sort ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... defeat definitely broke the Indians' power, for though there were subsequent outbreaks they were only sporadic and, with one exception, of comparatively little importance. Caonabo still remained at large and the Spaniards secured possession of his person by one of those feats of individual prowess which ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich

... an occasional morning. It does not mean sporadic or even regular "neighborhood visiting." It means observation, reflection, and study. It has nothing to do save indirectly with societies, or groups, or laws. It is a personal work, something nobody else can do, and something which, if it is neglected, ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell

... production and the supporting activities are vital to the economy, contributing about 50% to GDP. Despite the signing of a peace accord in November 1994 between the Angola Government and the UNITA insurgents, sporadic fighting continues and many farmers remain reluctant to return to their fields. As a result, much of the country's food must still be imported. To take advantage of its rich resources - notably gold, diamonds, extensive forests, Atlantic fisheries, ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... to the operations which are now in progress in the Dardanelles. [Cheers.] It is a good rule in war to concentrate your forces on the main theatre and not to dissipate them in disconnected and sporadic adventures, however promising they may appear to be. That consideration, I need hardly say, has not been lost sight of in the councils of the Allies. There has been and there will be no denudation or impairment of the forces ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... disentangled from association with the false context which perverts them. On the biological side we have simply the fact that any infant starts with precisely the assortment of impulsive activities with which he does start, they being blind, and many of them conflicting with one another, casual, sporadic, and unadapted to their immediate environment. The other point is that it is a part of wisdom to utilize the products of past history so far as they are of help for the future. Since they represent the results of prior ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey

... garb of devotion.[192] Among those collections for which the student of letters pines, not the least desirable would be a corpus of the lyric poets of Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. We should then see—after a fashion difficult if not impossible in the sporadic study of texts edited piecemeal, and often overlaid with comment not of the purely literary kind—at once the general similarity and the local or individual exceptions, the filiation of form, the diffusion of spirit. No division of literature, ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury

... earth as geology says they have. Our attention is caught, as a rule, only by the greater things, like the earthquakes at San Francisco and Valparaiso, and the tidal waves and cyclones of the South Seas; but the results of these sporadic and local cataclysms are far less than the effects of the persistent everyday forces of erosion, each one of which seems so small and futile. When we look at the Rocky Mountains with their high and rugged peaks, it seems almost impossible ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton

... Troops from Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia, Chad, and Sudan intervened to support the Kinshasa regime. A cease-fire was signed on 10 July 1999 by the DROC, Zimbabwe, Angola, Uganda, Namibia, Rwanda, and Congolese armed rebel groups, but sporadic fighting continued. KABILA was assassinated on 16 January 2001 and his son Joseph KABILA was named head of state ten days later. In October 2002, the new president was successful in getting occupying ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... return. It was absurd, fantastic. He was Gilbert Palgrave, the man who picked and chose, for whose attentions many women would give their ears, who stood in satirical aloofness from the general ruck; and as he held Joan in his arms and made sporadic efforts to dance whenever there was a few inches of room in which to do so, using all his ingenuity to dodge the menace of the elbows and feet of people who pushed and forced as though they were in a subway crush, he told himself that he would make it his business from that moment onward to lay ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton

... important to him, save as instruments, nor he to them, save as a supreme instrument of control. As miners they had their being, he had his being as director. He admired their qualities. But as men, personalities, they were just accidents, sporadic little unimportant phenomena. And tacitly, the men agreed to this. For Gerald agreed ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... among the facts we have described there are some which seem to suggest a possible and, indeed, as it seems to us, a very natural and probable mode of origin of totem-worship. We refer to the varieties of the NGARONG of the Ibans and sporadic analogous cases among the other tribes. We have seen that the NGARONG may assume the form of some curious natural object, or of some one animal distinguished from its fellows by some slight peculiarity, which receives the attentions ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall

... prevails, the muzzle, which has lately made its appearance in London, is strictly enforced, as at Trieste. Amongst the many boons which civilisation has conferred upon Cairo I may note hydrophobia; formerly unknown in Egypt the dreadful disease has lately caused more than one death. In India sporadic cases have at rare times occurred in my ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton

... Grammont's successes, this charge of horse; for his infantry had no luck anywhere; and the essential crisis of the Battle had been here. It continued still a good while; plenty of cannonading, fusillading, but in sporadic detached form; a confused series of small shocks and knocks; which were mostly, or all, unfortunate for Grammont; and which at length knocked him quite off the field. 'He was now interlaced with the English,' moans Noailles; 'so that my cannon, not to shoot ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... well to mention here two other sporadic attempts to lead colored colonists to Africa. In 1787 the gifted and erratic Dr. Wm. Thornton proposed himself to become the leader of a body of Rhode Island and Massachusetts colonists to Western Africa; he appears ...
— History of Liberia - Johns Hopkins University Studies In Historical And Political Science • J.H.T. McPherson

... up when the two conspiring freshmen took their places as near the door as seats could be found. The biting wintry air permeated the big auditorium, and when the restless shuffling of feet had finally come down to a murmur of soft sporadic shiftings—some girls never could keep their feet still— then the dean, Miss Rutledge, ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft

... There are several remarkable recoveries on record, but possibly the most wonderful is the case of J. P. West of Bellaire, Ohio, the portraits of which are reproduced in Plate 11. At seventeen months the child presented the typical appearance of a sporadic cretin. The astonishing results of six months' treatment with thyroid extract are shown in the second figure. After a year's treatment the child presents the appearance of a healthy ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... a parent is for is the best service of the child. Ancestor worship, that gross reversal of all natural law, is of wholly androcentric origin. It is strongest among old patriarchal races; lingers on in feudal Europe; is to be traced even in America today in a few sporadic efforts to magnify the deeds of ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... Disputes - international: sporadic border hostilities with Thailand over border alignment and ethnic Shan rebels operating ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... Accordingly, these supplies, mainly in pools and cisterns constructed by men in a bygone age, were systematically pumped or drained dry. By the end of June, no water was left available for enemy use within easy reach of the Canal. From this time forward the enemy attempted no more sporadic raids. He concentrated instead upon a serious attack against our main positions, which ...
— With the British Army in The Holy Land • Henry Osmond Lock

... them was the joint effort that must be made on either side the old feud line for the firm enforcement of the new treaty. They discussed plans for catching in time and throttling by joint action any sporadic insurgencies by which the experimentally minded might endeavour to test their ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... place. The stigma which, not altogether undeservedly, attaches to pastoral as a whole has tempted critics to confine their attention to the more notable examples of the kind, and to treat these as more or less sporadic manifestations. Thus they have failed, on the whole, to appreciate the relation in which these works stand to the general pastoral tradition, which was mainly carried on in works of little individual interest. It is no blame to them if they considered ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg

... this time there was only a sporadic chattering in response. Coffee was steaming before them, Wu Chi's powerful, thick, aromatic coffee, which only he knew how to make. They were in a mood, now, to hear stories, that tableful of people. An expected ally came to the ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand

... than half-a-dozen minor Babylons scattered over Europe, Asia, and America; and that it is far from being, except by the law of proportion the "greatest market of human flesh in the world." But by carefully and curiously misrepresenting the sporadic as the systematic, and by declaring that the "practice of procuration has been reduced to a science" (instead of being, we will suppose, one of the fine arts), it is easy to make out a case of the grossest calumny and most barefaced scandal ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... solar system; many of them curiously not anthropomorphic. Glittering and painted purveyors of more tawdry and shopworn goods than mining equipment also made fortunes overnight, and some of them paid for their greedy snatching at luxury with their empty lives. Brawls were sporadic and usually fatal. ...
— Master of the Moondog • Stanley Mullen

... all past attempts to settle wage disputes by reference to principles have been isolated and sporadic. They have, therefore, been virtually foredoomed to failure. For as will be made clearer as we progress, any successful attempt to base wage settlements upon principles will demand the consistent and courageous application of these principles for a not inconsiderable ...
— The Settlement of Wage Disputes • Herbert Feis

... amid the "old comedy" characters, of whom we always talk with sycophantic admiration. Sometimes we loathe them, but we never say so. There has been a sporadic revival of one or two of these "old comedies" this season, accomplished with that "bargain-counter" atrocity—a sop for vulgar minds—known mischievously as the "all-star-cast." It has been amusing to watch the cold, dispiriting and almost clammy reception accorded ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various

... formed a kingdom known after 1929 as Yugoslavia. Following World War II, Yugoslavia became an independent communist state under the strong hand of Marshal TITO. Although Croatia declared its independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, it took four years of sporadic, but often bitter, fighting before occupying Serb armies were mostly cleared from Croatian lands. Under UN supervision the last Serb-held enclave in eastern Slavonia was ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... Norway had amounted to but little. King Greyfell, a very active and valiant man, has constantly, without much difficulty, repelled these sporadic bits of troubles; but Greyfell, all the same, would willingly have peace with dangerous old Blue-tooth (ever anxious to get his clutches over Norway on any terms) if peace with him could be had. Blue-tooth, too, professes every willingness; inveigles Greyfell, he and Hakon do; to have a friendly ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle

... at which to review briefly what had been done in electric traction up to that date. There was absolutely no art, but there had been a number of sporadic and very interesting experiments made. The honor of the first attempt of any kind appears to rest with this country and with Thomas Davenport, a self-trained blacksmith, of Brandon, Vermont, who made ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin

... moment I was firmly convinced that the public could only be convicted of the blindness of its course, when a body of people with a hundred-fold of the moral energy possessed by a Settlement group, should make clear that there is no method by which any community can be guarded against sporadic efforts on the part of half- crazed, discouraged men, save by a sense of mutual rights and securities which will include ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... last great Indian wars had just come to an end, but there were still sporadic outbreaks here and there, and occasionally bands of marauding young braves were a menace to outlying and lonely settlements. Many of the white men were themselves lawless and brutal, and prone to commit outrages on the Indians. Unfortunately, each race tended to hold all the members of the other ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... finesse did Lapierre plot, however, and with such Machiavelian cunning and eclat were his plans carried out, that few failed. And those that did were credited by the authorities to individual or sporadic acts, rather than to the work of an intricate organization presided ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx

... level of physical assault. As in the case with patron complaints, however, the government adduced no quantitative data comparing the frequency of criminal or otherwise inappropriate patron conduct before the library's use of filters and after the library's use of filters. The sporadic anecdotal accounts of the government's library witnesses were countered by anecdotal accounts by the plaintiffs' library witnesses, that incidents of offensive patron behavior in public libraries have long predated the advent of ...
— Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling • United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania

... section of the mountains there had never been, since reconstruction days, any survival of the Ku-Klux in a true sense, but now and then, as in all wild and violent countries, sporadic "regulations" occurred in which masked men took a faltering law into their own less faltering hands. Sometimes it was a bastard Ku-Klux in the original meaning of the term, a Vigilance Committee operating against ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck

... me if I played upon it. I answered, no; and he put the instrument away with a sigh and the remark that he had thought I might. For some while he resisted the unspeakable temptation, his fingers visibly itching and twittering about his pocket, even his interest in the landscape and in sporadic anecdote entirely lost. Presently the pipe was in his hands again; he fitted, unfitted, refitted, and played upon it in dumb show ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson

... direction, threw up his post in the Civil Service and abandoned sporadic controversies, and they devoted themselves to the elaboration and realisation of this centre of public information she had conceived as their role. They set out to study the methods and organisation and realities of government in the most elaborate manner. ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... no such possibilities. We are assuming that the government will, as it has generally done in the past, respect treaty obligations, and that the intercourse of the Indians with their white neighbors will be marked by only such sporadic acts of individual wrong as are in ...
— The Indian Question (1874) • Francis A. Walker

... us to give more heed to the voice of Christian history as related to such questions as these. The rise of "sporadic sects" like the "Quietists," the "Mystics," the "Friends," and the "Brethren," with their emphasis on "the still voice" and "the inward leading," is very suggestive. If we may not go so far as some of these go in the insistence on speaking only as sensibly moved by the Spirit we may be admonished ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon

... Christendom. There is not a single idea in the fourteenth and fifteenth century mysticism which cannot be read far earlier in Augustine and Bernard, even in Aquinas and Scotus. It could never be anything but a sporadic phenomenon because it was so intensely individual. While it satisfied the spiritual needs of many, it could never amalgamate with other forces of the time, either social or intellectual. As a philosophy or a creed it led not ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... Christ is not sporadic, either in history or philosophy. To teach Christ, as the unlettered savage may who has just learned of Christ the Saviour and turns to teach his fellow-savages, might do good or save a soul from death. But in order to command the intellectual respect of the ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown

... of smoke shot with red tongues of flame overhung the city at different points, although they appeared to be more dense and frequent down in the "South of Market Street" region. There was also a rolling mass of flame above the water front and sporadic fires in ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton

... study in heredity, the Rossetti family is most interesting. Genius seems so sporadic a stuff that when we find an outcrop along the line of a whole family we are wont to mark it on memory's chart in red. We talk of the Herschels, of Renan and his sister, of the Beechers, and the Fields, in a sort of awe, mindful that Nature is parsimonious in giving out transcendent talent, and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard

... institution, to be judged as a totality. It is responsible for what it tolerates and shelters. We, therefore, hold it responsible for whatever of sensual impurity and whatever of irreligion, as well as for whatever of occasional and sporadic benefit there may be bound up in its organic life. Instead of helping Christ's kingdom, it hinders; instead of saving souls, it corrupts and destroys." Dr. Buckley gives this testimony: "Being aware of the fact that the drama, ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy

... dogs of examinees return to their vomit. Almost all the obstinate fictions you mention are of a quarter of a century date. Only then they were dominant and epidemic—now they are sporadic. ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley

... persons, did he consider that it could be carried to any success worth having. He saw of course the importance of a French alliance, and deeply desired it, for it was a leading element in the solution of the political and military situation; but alliance with a foreign power was one thing, and sporadic military volunteers were another. Washington had no narrow prejudices against foreigners, for he was a man of broad and liberal mind, and no one was more universally beloved and respected by the foreign officers than he; but he was intensely American in his feelings, and he would not admit ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge

... events following this night of May 15th and 16th as the outside world saw them. The frantic reports from Bermuda were forced into credibility by the appearance of apparitions at many points along the Atlantic seaboard of the southern States. They were sporadic appearances that night. No attacks were reported. But in all, at least a thousand wraithlike figures of men must have been seen. The visitations began at midnight and ended with dawn. To anyone, reading in the morning papers or hearing from the newscasters that "ghosts" ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings

... demands of the public and by this unique opportunity and eager to do and to do well. In the provinces[6338] as at Paris, people were seeking, trying and groping. There was room and encouragement for original, sporadic and multiple invention, for schools proportionate with and suited to various and changing necessities, Latin, mathematical or mixed schools, some for theoretical science and others for practical apprenticeship, these commercial and those industrial, from the lowest standpoint of technical and ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... that the demand of "The Land for the People" first took concrete form. Previously Mr Parnell and his lieutenants had been addressing meetings in many parts of the country, at which they advocated peasant proprietorship in substitution for landlordism, but now instead of sporadic speeches they had to their hand an organisation which supplied them with a tremendous dynamic force and gave a new edge to their Parliamentary performances. And not the least value of the new movement was that it immediately won over to active co-operation in ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan

... conflict between Briton and Boer is almost entirely political and in no way threatens the commercial integrity. Both the Dutchman and the Englishman agree on the whole larger proposition and the necessity of settling once and for all a trouble that carries with it the danger of sporadic outbreak or worse. Now we come to the whole irritating labor trouble which has neither color, caste, nor creed, or ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson

... the Brahmans. Hence Buddhism suffered far more from these invasions than Hinduism but still vestiges of it lingered long[277] and exist even now in Orissa. Taranatha says that the immediate result of the Moslim conquest was the dispersal of the surviving teachers and this may explain the sporadic occurrence of late Buddhist inscriptions in other parts of India. He also tells us that a king named Cangalaraja restored the ruined Buddhist temples of Bengal about 1450. Elsewhere[278] he gives a not discouraging picture ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... that what literature in America needs at this moment is honest, competent, sound criticism. This is not likely to be attained by sporadic efforts, especially in a democracy of letters where the critics are not always superior to the criticised, where the man in front of the book is not always a better marksman than the ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Charles Dudley Warner • Charles Dudley Warner

... Episcopal church the congregation shouts the responses, quietly, of course, and by the book, but it is shouting just the same, and with a beseeching use of words both joyful and agonizing that surpasses any sporadic shouting ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris

... tint, those very short coat-tails, that curved opening of the waistcoat, or those trouser-pockets. The paper turned-down collar, and the black necktie (of which only one square inch was ever visible), and the paper cuffs, which finished the tailor-made portion of Mr. Ollerenshaw, still linger in sporadic profusion. His low, flat-topped hat was faintly green, as though a delicate fungoid growth were just budding on its black. His small feet were cloistered in small, thick boots of glittering brilliance. The colour ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett

... (Irving Rosse, Virginia Medical Monthly, October, 1892.) I am told that popular feeling in South Africa would not permit the exhibition of the nude in the Art Collections of Cape Town. Even in Italy, nude statues are disfigured by the addition of tin fig-leaves, and sporadic manifestations of horror at the presence of nude statues, even when of most classic type, are liable to occur in all parts of Europe, including France and Germany. (Examples of this are recorded from time to time in Sexual-reform, published as an ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... uniform type of gneiss, crumpled and folded, showing all the signs of great antiquity—pre-Cambrian, in the geological phrase. Relieving the grey sheen of the gneiss were dark bands of schist which tracked about in an irregular manner. Sporadic quartz veins here and there showed a light tint. They were specially interesting, for they carried some less common minerals such as beryl, tourmaline, garnet, coarse mica and ores of iron, copper and molybdenum. The ores were present in small quantities, but gave promise of ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... full, life in its way was interesting, but it must be admitted that life was sometimes rather lonely. My editor, loyal soul that he was, wrote regularly, and came to see me twice a year. Professor Herbert Adams, a victim long at Jessica's feet, made sporadic departures from that position, and then humbly returned. These two alone were left us. Jessica acquired three gray hairs and a permanent ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan

... opportunity in the armed forces was an uneven process, the result of sporadic and sometimes conflicting pressures derived from such constants in American society as prejudice and idealism and spurred by a chronic shortage of military manpower. In his pioneering study of race relations, Gunnar Myrdal observes that ideals have always played a dominant ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.

... and those who resisted it would be fined, sold up, knocked on the head by policemen, thrown into prison, and in the last resort "executed" just as they are when they break the present law. But as our proprietary class has no fear of that conversion taking place, whereas it does fear sporadic cut-throats and gunpowder plots, and strives with all its might to hide the fact that there is no moral difference whatever between the methods by which it enforces its proprietary rights and the method by which the dynamitard asserts his conception of natural human rights, the Fabian Society ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw

... revocation of its provisions by both sides did not put an end to the military operations of the Central Powers in Russia, nor did the Russians cease to make feeble and sporadic attempts at resistance. Germany was forced to keep large bodies of troops along the Russian front, but formally Russia's part in the war had come to ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish

... Floods by these sporadic rainfalls have discoloured waters, as seen in Lopanza and Lolela to-day. The grass is all springing up quickly, and the Maleza growing fast. The trees generally in full foliage. Different shades of green, the dark prevailing; especially along rivulets, and the hills in the ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone

... Club, where I was to meet Fox, was one of those sporadic establishments that spring up in the neighbourhood of the Strand. It is one of their qualities that they are always just round the corner; another, that their stewards are too familiar; another, that they—in ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad

... outcome of events. The French, acting on interior lines, and propelled by the will of Bonaparte, utterly crushed these sporadic efforts. The Royalists were quelled or pacified, the coasts were well guarded, while the First Consul, crossing the Great St. Bernard, overthrew the Austrians at Marengo (14th June). Before long Naples ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... feel quite sure in concluding that the overestimation of the filled cutaneous spaces is not traceable to the influence of visualization. Parrish has explained all sporadic cases of overestimation as due to the optical illusion carried over in visualization. I have already shown that in my experiments visualization has really the opposite effect. In Parrish's experiments the overestimation ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various

... confusion of petticoats and sporadic displays of steamer-rugs along the ranks of deck-chairs. Deck-stewards darted hither and yon, wearing the harassed expressions appropriate to persons of their calling—doubtless to a man praying for that bright day when ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance

... ascertained.[7] It is possible that letters[8] and writings were known in some parts of the country as early as the fourth century, but it is nearly certain, that, outside the Court of the Emperor, there was scarcely even a sporadic knowledge of the literature of China until the Korean missionaries of Buddhism had obtained a lodgement in the Mikado's capital. Buddhism was the real purveyor of the foreign learning and became the vehicle by means of which Confucianism, ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... long ago voted rococo and stiff. In England and at court balls it served always as a way, a dignified manner, for sovereigns and people of inconveniently high rank to begin a ball, to open a festivity, and it had a sporadic existence in the country and at Washington even during the years when the Lancers, a much livelier dance, had chased it away from the New York balls for a long ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood

... shops and suspension of business for March 30. This Hartal at Delhi started a terrible outbreak which spread with unexpected violence over parts of the Bombay Presidency and the greater part of the Punjab, with sporadic disturbances in the North-West Frontier Province, ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol

... has had a career by no means glorious. In the early nineteenth century, at the time of our first considerable productivity in literature, it was sporadic. The great guns— Lowell, Emerson—fired critical broadsides into the past; only occasionally (as in "A Fable for Critics") were they drawn into discussions of their contemporaries, and then, as in the Emerson- Whitman affair, they sometimes regretted it. Reviewing ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby

... stone churinga are now, since 1904, known to be local, confined to the Arunta "nation," and the Kaitish, with very few sporadic exceptions in ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang

... some point on the Northern sea-coast of the United States; that can be done without danger to the people of the United States; that yellow fever in the army at present is not epidemic; that there are only a few sporadic cases; but that the army is disabled by malarial fever to the extent that its efficiency is destroyed, and that it is in a condition to be practically entirely destroyed by an epidemic of yellow fever, which is sure to come in the ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt

... perception, real or false. Every "hallucination" is a perception, "as good and true a sensation as if there were a real object there. The object happens not to be there, that is all." {0a} We are not here concerned with the visions of insanity, delirium, drugs, drink, remorse, or anxiety, but with "sporadic cases of hallucination, visiting people only once in a lifetime, which seems to be by far the most frequent type". "These," says Mr. James, "are on any theory hard to understand in detail. They are often extraordinarily complete; and the fact that many of them are ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang

... of antiquity we meet with sporadic statements to the effect that certain philosophers bore the epithet atheos as a sort of surname; and in a few of the later authors of antiquity we even find lists of men—almost all of them philosophers—who denied the existence of the gods. Furthermore, ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann

... does not stand alone. It is only one of several sporadic indications of the working of some powerful mental ferment over the whole of the area comprised between the Aegean and Northern Hindostan during the eighth, seventh, and sixth centuries before our era. In these ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... late and sporadic. Private adventure and sport as against continental organization. Prospect of war the cause of the formation of the Royal Flying Corps. A few pioneers encouraged by the Government—Mr. Cody, Lieutenant Dunne. The Dunne aeroplane. The history of ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh

... individual, alone, particular, isolated, sporadic, solitary; unmarried, celibate; simple, unmixed; honest, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming



Words linked to "Sporadic" :   noncontinuous, periodic, spasmodic, fitful, isolated, continual



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