half-wittedness

Rows of red brick villas in the suburbs of a town in the Midlands are, one would suppose, as hideous as human half-wittedness could invent or endure.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton Maisie Ward 1932

With the release of the German musician, who was found to be simple-minded to the verge of half-wittedness, public interest waned, and the case faded out of current print.

Average Jones Samuel Hopkins Adams 1914

Koll thought him an ill man to deal with and half a troll, [*] and grew afraid of his errand, since in Koll's half-wittedness there was much cunning -- for it was a cloak in which he wrapped himself.

Eric Brighteyes Henry Rider Haggard 1890

A certain picturesquely tattered man, living at some distance from the village, who was in the habit of waylaying my father at certain points on the estate, with well-timed agricultural remarks and a cunning affectation of half-wittedness and good-humour, got henceforward no half-crowns for his pains.

A Flat Iron for a Farthing or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing 1863

Old Ehrenthal looked at the suitor with a glance in which something of his old cunning shone through his half-wittedness.

Debit and Credit Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag Gustav Freytag 1855

I was thinking of the debacle in Cornwall, where twenty thousand tons of half-wittedness was buried in the sixties, only to percolate to the surface two decades later when the residents started to do inexplicably dumb things, such as using an electric mixer in the bath and parting their hair in the center. "

'First Among Sequels' 2007