Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The character of being perfunctory; negligent or half-hearted performance; carelessness.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun The quality or state of being perfunctory.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun The state or characteristic of being
perfunctory .
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Whereas other candidates for public office make their promises with a certain perfunctoriness, Sarkozy looked his electors in the eye: “Everything I have spoken, I will perform,” he said fiercely.
Un Homme in Full 2008
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Whereas other candidates for public office make their promises with a certain perfunctoriness, Sarkozy looked his electors in the eye: “Everything I have spoken, I will perform,” he said fiercely.
Un Homme in Full 2008
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It is strange that crucial policy decisions are handled with such mediocrity and perfunctoriness.
Archive 2009-07-01 Tusar N Mohapatra 2009
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It is strange that crucial policy decisions are handled with such mediocrity and perfunctoriness.
Prabhat Patnaik equates globalization with imperialism Tusar N Mohapatra 2009
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When at dusk she reached the Melchester station her husband was there to meet her, but in his perfunctoriness and her preoccupation they did not see each other, and she went out of the station alone.
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Hence her words “very nice,” “so charming,” were uttered with a perfunctoriness that made them sound absurdly unreal.
The Woodlanders 2006
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When she spoke there was no trace of the seductive in her voice, but rather a steely perfunctoriness.
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Memory has been emptied out by the long years abroad, and a certain perfunctoriness and staleness hangs over the scene.
Mrs. Wharton in New York Hardwick, Elizabeth 1988
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Quickly he undid his breeches and climbed on her, ashamed of the perfunctoriness of it, but needing to do it and get it over with.
Mary Queen Of Scotland And The Isles George, Margaret 1987
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Quickly he undid his breeches and climbed on her, ashamed of the perfunctoriness of it, but needing to do it and get it over with.
Mary Queen Of Scotland And The Isles George, Margaret 1987
bilby commented on the word perfunctoriness
"In all cases of petty rape, the victim does not figure as a personality, as someone vulnerable and valuable, whose responses must not be cynically tampered with. So great is women's need to believe that men really like them that they are often slow to detect perfunctoriness in proferred caresses or the subtle change in attitude when the Rubicon has been crossed and the softening up of the victim can give way to unilateral gratification."
- 'Seduction is a four-letter word', Germaine Greer in The Madwoman's Underclothes.
September 1, 2008