ham-fisted » hand fisted

Variant(s):  handfisted, hand-fisted

Classification: English – final d/t-deletion

Spotted in the wild:

  • The public sector unions aren’t going to let a team of handfisted amateurs take their overtime away. (Jane Galt at Asymmetrical Information, blog entry, August 11, 2004)
  • This goes back pre-9/11 to the transformation that Rumsfeld and people associated with him tried to do to the military, which hurt the army, helped some other parts. And he did it in a hand fisted way, which is his style, and he made a lot of people angry. (PBS, transcript of an interview with David Brooks, April 4, 2003)
  • However, this is a bit of a handfisted way of making copies and is what we in the trade call “lossy”. (uk.media.dvd, Dec 7, 2001)
  • However, the Bush Administration did not make quite that same argument. They could have but they didn’t. Was that just hand-fistedness? […] As indeed The New York Times has in a rather hand-fisted way confirmed for us now. (Hoover Institution, interview transcript, presenter Peter Robinson speaking, March 25, 2005)

Analyzed or reported by:

  • Linda Seebach via Mark Liberman at Language Log (Hand fisted, August 14, 2004)

Pat Schwieterman reminded us in the forum that this relatively old and well-documented find was still absent from the collection.

| link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/10/26 |

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