doltishness

Rodriguez is aptly deadpan when, directly addressing the audience, she outlines a taxonomy of doltishness: The trait encompasses 5,430 sub-categories, we learn, and they evolve continuously, like flu viruses.

Theater review of 'Como Evitar Enamorarse del Hombre Equivocado': Watch out, men 2011

In the absence of more rigorous mechanisms, routine doses of forced doltishness for the PM can be a kind of democracy.

Ed Miliband draws first blood at PMQs Rafael Behr 2010

It smacks of disorganization, desperation and a level of doltishness you don't usually see in modern-day campaigns where people are paid lots of money to know who's a contributor and to know who not to take a PR dump on.

Top Dog / Underdog 2008

To be phlegmatic denotes a slow, stolid temperament: in some people an enlightened temperance, in others mere doltishness.

Archive 2010-02-01 Rus Bowden 2010

It smacks of disorganization, desperation and a level of doltishness you don't usually see in modern-day campaigns where people are paid lots of money to know who's a contributor and to know who not to take a PR dump on.

Archive 2008-07-01 2008

And if we persist in our doltishness, he may just give us all the finger, or brush us off his shoulder.

Obama Camp: Hillary Complained About Rough Debate Treatment, Too 2009

And if we persist in our doltishness, he may just give us all the finger, or brush us off his shoulder.

Obama Camp: Hillary Complained About Rough Debate Treatment, Too 2009

Montaigne “strives to give worth to vanity itself – to doltishness – if it affords [him] pleasure.”

In Which Montaigne Reveals His Lack of Ambition and His Bovine Desires « So Many Books 2005

His politics are vaguely conservative, but basic doltishness, rather than opportunistic inconsistency, is their great failing – as when he urges a politician friend to present himself to poorer constituents as "an ambassador from the nation of learning."

Capital Pundits Parodied: An Anti-Mensch's Faux Memoirs 2001

So falleth it out, that having indeed no right comedy, in that comical part of our tragedy, we have nothing but scurrility, unworthy of any chaste ears: or some extreme show of doltishness, indeed fit to lift up a loud laughter, and nothing else: where the whole tract of a comedy should be full of delight, as the tragedy should be still maintained in a well-raised admiration.

English literary criticism Various