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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



... were 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, ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes

... supper, when the sun had gone down, and the great stillness crept over them again, Natalie's arms dropped at her sides, Garth's pipe went out, and an unaccountable sadness fell on both. Then, their sporadic attempts to keep up the old, friendly rattle rang so false that both fell silent. Their camp of itself had a gloomy aspect. It was pitched in an elbow of the river, where a section of the cut-bank had sunk down, making a little terrace of ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner

... Foch they have a great leader who is in no sense an "accident" (as Bonaparte was), a sporadic development in their midst, a spectacular growth on an exotic stem. They have, rather, a quintessential Frenchman of to-day, even more widely representative of his countrymen ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin

... and his goings were soon forgotten in the absorbing interest with which Patty listened as her little gray-haired hostess recounted incidents and horrors of the Indian uprising, the first sporadic depredations, the coming of the troops, and finally the forcing of the belligerent tribes onto ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx

... The hauteur and insolence of those "above" us are always unpleasant, but they are much easier to bear when we feel that they are entirely at variance with the theory of the society in which they appear, and are at worst merely sporadic manifestations. Even the tyranny of trusts is not to be compared to the tyranny of landlordism; for the one is felt to be merely an unhappy and (it is hoped) temporary aberration of well-meant social machinery, while the other seems bred in the very bone of the national existence. ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

... as 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 to have been in communication with Hopkins on the subject a year later, ...
— History of Liberia - Johns Hopkins University Studies In Historical And Political Science • J.H.T. McPherson

... is unlike all other revolutions in many respects. It is not sporadic. It is not a flame of popular discontent, arising in a day and dying down in a day. It is older than the present generation. It has a history and traditions, and a martyr-roll only less extensive possibly than the martyr-roll ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London

... hold of civilisation upon Kent is explicable. But when the influence of Rome begins to spread again over England you have distances covered which are astounding; there occur sporadic incidents of the highest importance in spots where they would be the least expected. Among the very first of these is the first baptism of ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc

... were all reformers in their various ways. We see how these restless spirits have appeared everywhere at irregular intervals, not only in localities favoured by nature, but often in the most unlikely places, and there is no reason for thinking that this sporadic cropping up of new leaders ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen

... horses in nearly all parts of the United States. Its appearance in America is by no means of recent occurrence, for the malady was reported by Large in 1847, by Michener in 1850, and by Liautard in 1869 as appearing in both sporadic and enzootic form in several of the Eastern States. Since then the disease has occurred periodically in many States in all sections of the country, and has been the subject of numerous investigations and publications by a number of the leading men ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture

... and naval ascendency of Great Britain to the United States during the next two or three decades a very probable thing, and when this is accomplished the problem how far colonial loyalty is the fruit of Royal Visits and sporadic knighthoods, and how far it has relation to the existence of a predominant fleet, will be near its solution. An interesting point about such discussions as this, in which indeed in all probability the nascent consciousness of the New Republic will emerge, will be the solution ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... using more coffee than formerly, allowing for the increase in population? Of course there are sporadic increases, in particular years and groups of years, and they may indicate to the casual observer that our coffee drinking is mounting rapidly. And then there is the steadily growing import figure, double what it was within the memory ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers

... notice and something of the admiration of the world by his willingness to bet a million dollars on the turn of the weather. In the years of criticism and readjustment that followed this period of sporadic growth, writers have told with great clearness how the thing was done, and some of the participants, captains of industry turned penmen, Caesars become ink- slingers, have bruited the ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson

... the Grocery Boy To the Janitor To the Waiter To the Apartment House Telephone Girl To the Barber To the Hall and Elevator Boy Ballade of a Hardy Annual A Plea Footlight Motifs—Mrs. Fiske Footlight Motifs—Olga Nethersole Ballade of the Average Reader Poesy's Guerdon Signal Service Sporadic Fiction Popular Ballad; "Never Forget Your Parents" Ballade to a Lady (To Annabelle) To a Thesaurus The Ancient Lays Erring in Company The Limit Chorus for Mixed Voices The Translated Way "And Yet It Is a Gentle Art." Occasionally ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams

... 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

... those 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

... one thing remained to temper the distrust: sporadic communication had been established, a thing new and yet heavy with pretense, which again like a serpent at its tail spelled mutual distrust. But it was there, begrudging, and all the smaller tribes knew of it too—those scattered ones who were little more than clans. All the peoples of the ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse

... happy years of bourgeois vagabondage. At first he felt the young artist's soreness that, with the exception of rare, sporadic engagements, neither London nor Paris would have him. Once he appeared at the Empire, in Leicester Square, an early turn, and kept on breaking bits of his heart every day, for a week, when the curtain went down in the thin applause that is ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke

... 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 ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... much pleasure as they might from the same environment is doubtful. The business is not properly organised, and only half understood by the greater number of those who are nevertheless so well pleased by the experiment that they are anxious to repeat it. Sporadic camping out involves too much fetching and carrying. Tradesmen do not "call" at isolated tents in a riverside meadow, and all commodities have to be fetched by the campers. On the other hand, sociable camping out, when several groups set up their tents in proximity, needs proper arrangement. ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish

... much more fiercely and passionately. She had been married over two years. At first there had been days of serene understanding, rising to ecstasies of proprietorship and pride. Alternating with these periods had occurred sporadic hates, enduring a short hour, and forgetfulnesses lasting no longer than an afternoon. That had been ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... commons enclosed, and arable land converted to pasture. The mass of the agricultural population became mere labourers without rights of property on the soil they tilled; thousands lost employment and swelled the ranks of sturdy beggars; and sporadic disorder came to a head in Kett's rebellion in Norfolk in 1549, which was with difficulty suppressed. But even this highhanded expropriation of peasants by their landlords stimulated national development. It created a vagrant mobile mass of labour, which helped ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard

... one idea follows another in a well-reasoned argument. In Miss Coleridge's mind images arranged themselves in no progressive order; one bears no particular relationship to another; they are disconnected, sporadic. Great imagination is architectural; it sets fancy upon fancy until it has composed a splendid and intelligible whole—a valid castle in the air. Miss Coleridge could not build; ideas broke in her mind in showers of whims, ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell

... reason; and it is clearly more reasonable on other grounds to suppose that these regulations are of independent origin. But we know the eight-class rule to have arisen from a division within a generation, which the Dieri rule is not. Therefore the latter must be sporadic. ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas

... Plastic art is often employed for scenic arrangement, and music to produce effects on and behind the stage. Both were made use of by Schiller; and it was under his influence that they were tried by Goethe in his later period—though we find a remarkable sporadic appearance of them even as early as Goetz and Klavigo. The mastery which Grillparzer also attained in this respect has been striven after by his fellow countrymen with some degree of success: as, for example, by Ferdinand Raimund, by Ludwig Anzengruber, and also by Friedrich Halm ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... specialists of the U.S. Department of Agriculture have issued a warning to commercial and other growers of mushrooms to regard with suspicion any abnormal mushrooms which appear in their beds. It seems that occasionally sporadic forms appear in mushroom beds, persist for a day or two, and then disappear. These are generally manure-inhabiting species and may be observed shortly after the beds have been cased. In the instance ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various

... utter; resperse[obs3], intersperse; set abroach[obs3], circumfuse[obs3]. turn adrift, cast adrift; scatter to the winds;. spread like wildfire, disperse themselves. Adj. unassembled &c. (see assemble &c. 72); dispersed &c. v.; sparse, dispread, broadcast, sporadic, widespread; epidemic &c. (general) 78; adrift, stray; disheveled, streaming. Adv. sparsim[obs3], here and ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... flowers. Of course, we cannot explain why both means of attraction should exist in one genus, and only one of them in another, since we do not know the minutest details of the conditions of life of the genera concerned. But from the sporadic distribution of scent-scales in Lepidoptera, and from their occurrence or absence in nearly related species, we may conclude that fragrance is a relatively MODERN acquirement, more recent than ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... 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 ...
— Master of the Moondog • Stanley Mullen

... the dugout had just played a game of dummy bridge, and now sat smoking and bickering as peacefully as if they were in a college club-room in America. The night on the front was what the French call "relativement calme." Sporadic explosions above punctuated but did not interrupt the debate, which eddied about the high theme of Education—with a capital "E"—and the particular point of dispute ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke

... this literature falls into three periods, (i) from the seventh century until the reign of Ralpachan in the ninth, (ii) the reign of Ralpachan, and (in) some decades following the arrival of Atisa in 1038. In the first period work was sporadic and the translations made were not always those preserved in the Kanjur. Thonmi Sanbhota, the envoy sent to India in 616 is said to have made renderings of the Karanda Vyuha and other works (but not those now extant) and three items in the Tanjur ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot

... people busy about anywhere? Human purpose here has been as blind and sporadic as it is at Westminster, unrelated to any fixed star, lucky to fill the need of the day, building without any distant design, flowing in bulk through the lowest channels that offered. As elsewhere, it is obstructed by the unrecognized mistakes of its past. Our part of London, like Kensington ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson

... cut in. But 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

... 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 ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... parents, and what not, the former running a good deal to shiny faces and Eton collars, the latter stressing the black-satin note rather when female, and looking as if their coats were too tight, if male. And presently there was some applause—sporadic, Jeeves has since told me it was—and I saw Gussie being steered by a bearded bloke in a gown to a seat in the middle of ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse

... 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 ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair

... challenged by an insurrection backed by Rwanda and Uganda. Troops from Angola, Chad, Namibia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe intervened to support the Kinshasa regime. A cease-fire was signed in July 1999 by the DRC, Congolese armed rebel groups, Angola, Namibia, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zimbabwe but sporadic fighting continued. Laurent KABILA was assassinated in January 2001 and his son, Joseph KABILA, was named head of state. In October 2002, the new president was successful in negotiating the withdrawal of Rwandan forces occupying eastern ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States

... written to prove a conclusion formulated a priori, but with a sincere desire that the truth about the matter should be known. We read much in modern books devoted to the era of the Corsican about "the Napoleonic legend." There seems to be, just here, a little sporadic Napoleonic legend, to which vitality has been given from quarters whence have come some heavy blows ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott

... 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 ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock

... for 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 ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon

... to superman her, to get a marriage license and go up to the Medill house and tell her she'd have to marry him at once or call it off forever. So he presented himself, his heart, his license, and his ultimatum, and within five minutes they were in the midst of a violent quarrel, a burst of sporadic open fighting such as occurs near the end of all long wars and engagements. It brought about one of those ghastly lapses in which two people who are in love pull up sharp, look at each other coolly and think it's all been a mistake. Afterward they usually kiss wholesomely ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... 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 ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton

... refer first 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 which are at work in Flanders, and both the French and ourselves ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... time 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 ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan

... used to say that this vice is prevalent in a zone extending from the South of Spain through Persia to China and then opening out like a trumpet and embracing all aboriginal America. Within this zone he declared it to be endemic, outside it sporadic.] ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright

... (though I don't care a double-blank domino if you don't, for it is true) when I tell you that an opposition society already exists—a society for the manufacture of celebrities. Self-puffery has always gone on in a sporadic fashion, most people sending their own puffs to the papers, and rolling their own logs, on the principle that if you want a thing done well you must do it yourself. But the idea of the society is the organisation of self-puffery. It is done through an association which undertakes (for a fee) ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... Chester, now baseball mad apparently, had, until this season, seemed to be wrapped in a regular Rip Van Winkle sleep of twenty years, in so far as outdoor sports for boys went. Time and again there had been a sporadic effort made to enthuse the school lads in baseball, football, hockey, and such things, but something seemed lacking in the leadership, and all the new schemes died soon after ...
— Jack Winters' Baseball Team - Or, The Rivals of the Diamond • Mark Overton

... those of the Parisinus, or did he draw them straight from that source itself? The crucial cases are 65, 11 and 24. As he must have gone to the Parisinus for these readings, he presumably found the others there, too. Moreover, he did not get his new variants by a merely sporadic consultation of the ancient book when he was dissatisfied with the accepted text of his day, for in the two crucial cases and many of the others, too, that text makes sense; some of the readings, indeed, are accepted by modern editors as correct.[65] Aldus ...
— A Sixth-Century Fragment of the Letters of Pliny the Younger • Elias Avery Lowe and Edward Kennard Rand

... of Greek philosophy which preceded the coming of Christ, human reason, unfolding itself from beneath, had aspired after that knowledge of divine things which is from above. It had felt within itself the deep-seated consciousness of God—the sporadic revelation of Him "who is not far from any one of us"—the immanent thought of that Being "in whom we live and move and are," and it had striven by analysis and definition to attain a more distinct and logical apprehension. The heart of man had been stirred with ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... Sweden, on account of their comparatively isolated positions, have been more successful in keeping out the disease. The outbreaks in those countries have been more sporadic, and by resorting to immediate slaughter the authorities have been able to stamp them out. Great Britain has applied both quarantine and slaughter for many years, and in an outbreak near Dublin in 1912 measures were adopted which were even more stringent than any that have been used ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture

... 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 ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine

... 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 on ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington

... 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 man behind ...
— Widger's Quotations of Charles D. Warner • David Widger

... as 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

... by this time by wider marriages, though these might be effected with greater difficulty by albinos than by six-fingered persons. At any rate no one can doubt that it might at any time be wiped out by such marriages, though even when apparently wiped out, sporadic cases might be expected to occur: what the breeders call "throws-back," when they see an animal which resembles some ancestor further back in the line of descent than its actual progenitors. Certainly the most remarkable instance of the reliance which we have come to feel respecting this matter ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle

... The dismal and sporadic attempts at conversation had slumped into an awkward silence, in the midst of which the door burst open and young Charlie ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx

... remainder, as the weeks pass, glide into something like a routine of occupations. For several weeks I spent an hour or two every day carving with a broken knife-blade a spoon from a block of hard wood. Sporadic wood-splitting is going on, and cooking appears to be one of the fine arts. An hour daily of oral exercises in French, German, Spanish, Latin, or Italian, under competent teachers, after the Sauveur or Berlitz method, amused and to some extent instructed many. Our cavalry adjutant, ...
— Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons - A Personal Experience, 1864-5 • Homer B. Sprague

... 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 ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells

... people. The King has, on my recommendation, sent Dr. Boetticher to spend two years here and in Paris in order to bring to light the Syriac treasures which have not been laid claim to by Cureton. I see that I have not been mistaken in him in spite of his sporadic many-sidedness. I am free from the 2d of December. There is a letter of mine just printing to Miss Winkworth, "On Niebuhr's Political Character," ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller

... 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 ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway

... than seventy-six meteor-swarms (most of them inconspicuous) with those of comets. The still more recent researches of Mr W. F. Denning make it probable that there are no meteors which do not belong to a flock or system probably formed by the disintegration of a cometary mass; even the apparently sporadic ones which shoot across the sky, "lost souls in the night,'' being members of flocks which have become so widely scattered that the earth sometimes takes weeks to pass through the region of space ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss

... in the United States the symptoms of a rebellious spirit in the ranks of the working masses are rapidly multiplying. Widespread and extensive strikes for better labor conditions, the demand of the 2,000,000 railway workers to control their industry, sporadic formation of labor parties, apparently, though not fundamentally, in opposition to the political parties of the possessing class, are promising indications of a definite tendency on the part of American labor to break away from its reactionary and futile leadership and to join in the great ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto

... his resolute, martial figure. His well-set-up, graceful form, his nobly poised head and easy soldierly bearing contrasted sharply with the lazy shuffle of the prosperous Swiss denizens and the listless lolling of the sporadic foreign tourists. Crisp, curling, tawny hair, a sweeping soldierly moustache, with a resolute chin and gleaming blue eyes accentuated a handsome face burnt to a dark olive by the fiery Indian sun. An easy insouciance tempered the habitual military smartness ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage

... deaths of men and women that you knew intimately, and the prickly-heat covers you as 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 ...
— The Man Who Would Be King • Rudyard Kipling

... than by irregular occurrences, such as the deluge, in seeming contravention of it. To seek the evidence of divine activity in human affairs and to ground one's faith in a controlling Providence in sporadic and cometary phenomena, rather than in the constant and cumulative signs of it to be seen in the majestic order of the starry skies, in the reign of intelligence throughout the cosmos, in the moral evolution ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton

... 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

... however, the interior of the land was comparatively tranquil. Sporadic outbreaks in the Bombay Presidency and the Punjaub had been crushed promptly. The great plan of a wide-spread concerted rising throughout the peninsula had come to naught, thanks to the papers that Dermot had found in the man-eater's ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly

... But these were sporadic efforts. It was not till the spring of 1593, after Shakespeare had secured a nobleman's patronage for his earliest publication, 'Venus and Adonis,' that he became a sonnetteer on an extended scale. Of the hundred and fifty-four sonnets that survive outside his ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee

... Namur was accompanied by sporadic outrages. Near Marchovelette wounded men were murdered in a farm by German soldiers. The farm was set on fire. A German cavalryman rode away holding in front of him one of the farmer's daughters ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... 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 ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas

... divided into three classes: adventitious deafness, congenital or hereditary deafness, and infantile or sporadic congenital deafness, the last class including many cases where there are other antecedent defects, mental or physical, or where the deafness occurred shortly after birth with the exact cause not definitely determined. ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best

... clairaudiences at all. Clairaudience consists in receiving auditory impressions of intelligible phrases not previously associated with the name of person or place involved in the statement. These impressions may be sporadic or may be continuous. In the case of a genuine development where the interior sense is fully opened up, the communication will be continuous and normal, as much so as ordinary conversation, and the translation of consciousness into terms of sense will be so rapid and unimpeded as ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial

... which made a deeper impression upon me than anything I have seen in this campaign. After the white flag had been hoisted by the survivors and we had marched in, I halted my men just here at the entrance to this arcade. We didn't dare venture into the redan, for sporadic explosions were still occurring in the ammunition stores. Also there were fires raging. Smoke was pouring thickly out of the mouth of the tunnel. It didn't seem possible that there could be anyone ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb

... among the world's lowest. Subsistence agriculture provides the main livelihood for 85% of the population. Oil production and the supporting activities are vital to the economy, contributing about 50% to GDP. Notwithstanding the signing of a peace accord in November 1994, sporadic violence continues, millions of land mines remain, and many farmers are 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-gold, diamonds, extensive forests, Atlantic fisheries, arable land, and large ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... sat 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 ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke

... and he may assert that all his guest 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 life of ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux

... the 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 ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... 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 of his face matched that of his suit. He had no moustache and no whiskers, but ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett

... you that I burn less carbon than some years ago. I see people of my standing really good for nothing, decrepit, effete, la levre inferieure deja pendante, with what little life they have left mainly concentrated in their epigastrium. But as the disease of old age is epidemic, endemic, and sporadic, and everybody that lives long enough is sure to catch it, I am going to say, for the encouragement of such as need it, how I treat the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various

... 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 the ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... 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

... gazed 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 she ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field

... to be more fixed, they may remain for a longer time in clothes or furniture; as a thread dipped in variolous matter has given the disease by inoculation after having been exposed many days to the air, and after having been kept many months in a phial. This also accounts for the slow or sporadic progress of the scarlet fever, as it infects others at but a very small distance from the sick; and does not produce a quantity of pus-like matter, like the small-pox, which can adhere to the clothes of the attendants, and when dried is liable to be shook off in the form of powder, and thus ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... address before the Sanitary Conference at Brighton in 1888. From this and other perfectly trustworthy sources some idea may be gained of the triumph of the scientific over the theological method of dealing with disease, whether epidemic or sporadic. ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... 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 of Buddhism ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... dispensed with, some nine hundred thousand are being clothed, or are going to be clothed, in khaki, and given Government pay. Thus the actual unemployment among men is, except in (certain) black patches, only sporadic and scarcely more than we are accustomed to. Very different is the situation of the women wage-earners. Of these apparently half a million are now unemployed, and twice as many are working only short time. ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,

... persist in saying it is incidental, secondary and sporadic might well be said to be of that class of theological disputants who never study their Bible; for the fact is should you cut out every reference to the Second Coming, its cognate truths and all the events to which it gives emphasis, you would have but a fragment of the Bible; ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman

... 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 ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen

... of sporadic efforts in different parts of the country, [17] and the introduction of a number of bills into Congress which failed to secure passage, the favorite English plan was followed and a Presidential ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... at the end of July. All over Europe the demand for wheat was active. Grain handlers were not only buying freely, but were contracting for future delivery. In August came the first demands for American wheat, scattered and sporadic at first, then later, a little, a very ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris

... a useful, suggestive institution, and has done work of value (as it would doubtless say itself) in a more or less nagging and sporadic way, but it has had no national militant vision or sense of thoroughness in what it could do because it lacked the advertising clinch, the advertising willfulness and irresistibleness ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee

... States 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 ...
— The Settlement of Wage Disputes • Herbert Feis

... now on a map what I would call the Great-House region; passing south-westward into Belgravia, becoming diffused and sporadic westward, finding its last systematic outbreak round and about Regent's Park. The Duke of Devonshire's place in Piccadilly, in all its insolent ugliness, pleases me particularly; it is the quintessence of the thing; Apsley House is all in the manner of my theory, Park ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... him mainly on the sentimental side, but that evening he launched out as a raconteur, and was gay and brilliant. Even Mr. Janes was awakened to sporadic laughter at the dinner-table, where they sat by preconcerted arrangement without the formality of evening-dress, and fared admirably from the hors d'oeuvres to the coffee—a flawless meal. And dinner being over, ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray

... a number of months the silent partner in the construction of this sporadic column of 'Sharps and Flats' has been a little fox terrier given to the writer hereof by his friend, Mr. Will J. Davis. We named our little companion Jessie, and our attachment to her was wholly reciprocated by Jessie herself, although (and we make this confession ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... for Women" 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

... the licensing act of 1737 stipulated that Covent Garden and Drury Lane exclusively were the patented and licensed theaters (respectively) in London, a fact directly related to the revolt of prestigious players six years later. Although there were sporadic performances of "legitimate" drama in unlicensed playhouses between 1737 and 1743, full-time professional actors and actresses were in effect locked into the approved theaters during the regular theatrical season. Suspecting a cartel directed against them personally and professionally by the ...
— The Case of Mrs. Clive • Catherine Clive

... 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 Invisible Man • H. G. Wells

... meal off one." The latter was plainly chagrined at this light thrown on his petty appetites. He assumed an air of complete detachment in the portioning of the dish; but, at the same time, managed to supply himself liberally. The conversation was sporadic. Howat Penny found the dinner lavish, and divided his attention between it and Kate Polder. James and Mariana addressed general remarks to the table at succeeding intervals. Mr. Polder gloomed, and Isabella went through the gestures, ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... siege of Corinth was proceeding in the leisurely manner that characterized the progress of a suit in chancery under the ancient equity methods. From our camp on Owl creek we could hear, from time to time, sporadic outbursts of cannonading, but we became so accustomed to it that the artillery practice ceased to excite any special attention. The Confederates began quietly evacuating the place during the last days of May, completed the operation on the 30th of the month, and ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell

... to the beginning of 1916 the sporadic Social Democratic opposition to the war, mainly by Dr. Liebknecht, was ignored by the Government. The war-machine was running so smoothly, and, from the German standpoint, so victoriously, that the Government thought it could safely let Liebknecht ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin

... character from the radicalism and liberalism of the Victorian days. There were not only doubt and denial, but now there were also impatience and unreason. People argued less and acted quicker. There was a pride in rebellion for its own sake, an indiscipline and disposition to sporadic violence that made it extremely hard to negotiate any reconciliations or compromises. Behind every extremist it seemed stood a further extremist prepared to ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells

... 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 ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley

... West relative to the introduction of some material into ink to prevent moulding. Dr. Gale had astonished his friend by stating— "will prevent the deposition of the ova of infusoria animalcutae;" when it was suggested that he add "and the sporadic growths of thallogenic cryptograms and be fatal ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho

... the evolution of the ideal and mechanical schools during the ages which separate us from their origin; and while the influence of the one gradually waned, the other gained strength, although in a sporadic way, first among privileged minds, and ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli

... of these sporadic efforts at escape, Lieutenant McClure decided to wait until one o'clock for another supreme effort. It would be high tide at noon and he decided to make the great effort shortly thereafter on the thin hope that he might get away with the tide ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll

... that have been classified, certain shooting-stars that apparently have no determined radiant point. These are called sporadic meteors. ...
— A Field Book of the Stars • William Tyler Olcott

... the tide of Federalism, which had been steadily rising for six years, was about to ebb. There were sporadic indications of it. Perhaps Livingston thought it had already turned, since Republicans had recently won several significant elections. Two years before DeWitt Clinton and his associates had suffered defeat in a city which now returned four assemblymen ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander

... hereafter assume them to be trustworthy and truthful whether individually or in the mass, except in such cases as shall have been publicly proven to the contrary, and that he will always understand and declare that such isolated cases are purely sporadic and not in any way to be taken as evidences either of an epidemic or of a general low state of public morality, but that on the contrary the said American commercial classes do, whether in the mass or individually, hate and despise an occasional ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson

... not been precisely 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, or the Chinese ethical principles, reached the common ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... difference between sporadic display and that continuity which is the final proof of efficiency," ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer

... forges hold Contagion's breath; A Morgan longs for earthly home. 'Tis so with hell's eternal shoal Where skinks eat flesh from wenches' bone; 'Tis thus with us purloined by Death, Infernal doom that spells a moan. Ten thousand years was Doom crown'd King; Sporadic prayers each gnarl'd one lisped; Despotic sway all subjects curs'd When Hell was new and Earth unborn: Now souls of man in torture sing, Each Idol's glyph by damn'd one's kiss'd. Who then shall say who is the worst, A vyper's brood ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque

... Uganda-backed rebellion in August 1998. 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 Rwandan forces to withdraw from eastern Congo; two months later, an agreement was signed ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... new and third Attack. Simultaneous universal effort of foot and horse upon Daun's Front; Holstein himself, who is almost at Zinna by this time, to go upon Daun's right wing. This is Attack Third; and is of sporadic intermittent nature, in the thickening dusk and darkness: part of it successful, none of it beaten, but nowhere the success complete. Thus, in the extreme west or leftmost of Friedrich's attack, SPAEN Dragoons,—one of the last Horse ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... initial stage of peaceable life as is here assumed. There is no point in cultural evolution prior to which fighting does not occur. But the point in question is not as to the occurrence of combat, occasional or sporadic, or even more or less frequent and habitual; it is a question as to the occurrence of an habitual; it is a question as to the occurrence of an habitual bellicose frame of mind—a prevalent habit of judging facts and events from the point of view ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen

... back to Italy, and lingered a while in Florence before going on to Rome. In Florence Roderick seemed to have won back his old innocence and his preference for the pleasures of study over any others. Rowland began to think of the Baden episode as a bad dream, or at the worst as a mere sporadic piece of disorder, without roots in his companion's character. They passed a fortnight looking at pictures and exploring for out the way bits of fresco and carving, and Roderick recovered all his earlier fervor of appreciation and comment. In Rome he went eagerly to work again, and finished ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James

... in a complete versatility, quite apart from the depth 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 a ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp

... Babylon" is not worse in such matters 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 ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... from the last memories of the squat temple boxes of the Greek, the buxom curvatures of Rome; the Goth in us will have taken to steel and countless new materials as kindly as once he took to stone. The gay and swiftly moving platforms of the public ways will go past on either hand, carrying sporadic groups of people, and very speedily we shall find ourselves in a sort of central space, rich with palms and flowering bushes and statuary. We shall look along an avenue of trees, down a wide gorge between the cliffs of crowded hotels, ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

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

... this matter the United States is behind all other progressive countries. There have been many sporadic efforts made and there are Esperanto groups in different places from New York and Boston to Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Tacoma, etc., but as a national movement it is not what it should be, and the difficulty is, to far as I can make it out, the enormous size of the country. It ...
— Esperanto: Hearings before the Committee on Education • Richard Bartholdt and A. Christen

... present generation of degenerates, and that the community of fifty or seventy years hence shall have no incubus of mentally, or morally, or even physically, degenerate members—none but a few occasional sporadic morbid 'sports' from the normal, which it, in turn, may effectively prevent from handing on their like." Unless the problem is squarely faced, Perrycoste concludes, national deterioration must increase and a permanently successful collectivist society ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis

... 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 or Bolshevik propaganda—or both—by ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers

... movement 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 three hundred years, prophetism attained its apogee ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... 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 ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White

... consciousness to be coextensive with 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 we find, moreover, intermediate ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson

... disturbances in 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, ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle

... 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 ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... the "redemption" of these states from the enforced and sporadic political ideas of the reconstruction era, they set themselves earnestly at work to root out and destroy all the pernicious elements of the township system, and to restore that organization by which the South had formerly achieved power and control in the national councils, had ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee

... There have been sporadic and isolated cases of hunger strikes in this country but to my knowledge ours was the first to be organized and sustained over a long period of time. We shall see in subsequent chapters how ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens

... 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 ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson

... of the Great War in Europe the fleets of the Teutonic alliance were locked up in port by the superior floating forces of the Entente. Such sporadic dashes into the arena of conflict as the one made by the German High Fleet, bringing on the Battle of Jutland, had but little bearing on the progress of the war. But the steady, persistent malignant activity of the German submarines ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot

... seen it just this way or not. He had read a little of city missions, and charitable enterprises, but they had scarcely reached his inner consciousness. His impression gathered from such desultory reading had been that the effort in that direction was sporadic and ineffective. And so, in his gigantic ignorance and egotism, yet with his exquisite sensitiveness to the inward call, Michael henceforth set himself to espouse ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill

... 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 tiny flower, whitish in color, ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various

... with political corruption in high places, the most formidable peril to any Government and, if it be not encountered and overcome, fatal to a Republic. A nation will survive a corrupt minister or monarch, but a corrupt people must surely and speedily perish. We have had sporadic examples of corruption in high office at several periods in our history. The first sixteen years after the inauguration of the Constitution, including the Administrations of Washington, John Adams, and the first four years of Jefferson, were by no means ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar

... strict necessity of Infant Baptism, and the absolute universality of the practice did not commence till the dogma of original guilt had begun to despotize in the Church: while that remained uncertain and sporadic, Infant Baptism was so too; some did it, many did not. But as soon as Original Sin in the sense of actual guilt became the popular creed, then all did ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge

... those abnormally springlike days that New York sometimes experiences at the latter end of March, days when negligee shirts and last summer's straw hats make a sporadic appearance, and bucolic weather prophets write letters to the afternoon papers abusing the sun-spots. Really, it was hot, and I was anxious to get out of the dust and glare; it would be cool at the club, and I intended dining there. The time ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen

... but accounts for less than 15% of GDP. Oil production is vital to the economy, contributing about 60% 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 requirements must still be imported. Angola has rich natural resources - notably gold, diamonds, and arable land, in addition to large oil deposits - ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency

... Brooklyn, Says: "The American theater is a concrete 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 ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy

... 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

... considers the confused, complicated, and sporadic elements of German history, it seems scarcely possible to present a clear, continuous narrative. Yet this is what Bayard Taylor did. He omitted no episode of importance, and yet managed to preserve a main line of connection from century to century throughout ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan

... estimate of this kind can be made, and the respective ranks of the world's naval powers ascertained. Germany has shown all through the war that she thoroughly appreciated the British naval supremacy. Her fleet has ventured little more than sporadic operations from the well-fortified bases behind Heligoland. It was probably the pressure of public opinion, and not the expectation that she would achieve anything of military advantage, that forced her to send her high-sea fleet into conflict with ...
— The Journal of Submarine Commander von Forstner • Georg-Guenther von Forstner

... Romantic critics did not form a school. Like everything else in the English Romantic movement, its criticism was individual, isolated, sporadic, unsystematised. It had no official mouthpiece, like Sainte-Beuve and the Globe; its members formed no compact phalanx like that which, towards the close of our period, threw itself upon the 'classiques' of Paris. Nor did they, with the one exception of Coleridge, approach the Romantic critics ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... thought. Numbers of the younger clergymen of the Establishment must have been profoundly moved by it, because the faith of an Anglican is a comparatively elastic thing compared with the rigidity of supernatural conceptions which distinguishes the Roman Catholic communion. It may even be true that these sporadic outbreaks of Ritualism, which are so seriously threatening to "trouble Israel's peace," owe no little of their force to the far-reaching effects of the new religious controversy. The Newcomes of to-day, like their prototype in the novel, may very well have come to the belief ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan



Words linked to "Sporadic" :   discontinuous, irregular, periodic, stray, isolated, intermittent, occasional, infrequent, fitful, spasmodic, unpredictable



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