0 without a clear plan or purpose and showing little effort or interest: --
She made a desultory attempt at conversation.
That shows in what a desultory manner nurses were expected to pick up their education in those days.
I apologise for the rather desultory nature of these remarks.
It is the fact that we have been engaged in desultory and spasmodic conflicts for periods of that length.
The convoys of food have been kept up in spite of desultory attacks made by hooligans and strikers.
Edmonston (1809) noted that women usually lived longer than men, and preserved their faculties better, 'it may be from having been less exposed to excessive and desultory labour'.
The conversation was desultory, lazy, pointless.
The ending is not consolation, but desolation - or, if even that risks sounding too sentimental - desultory, with a few clattery, breathy sounds that might as well be silence.
It is, moreover, somewhat desultory and impressionistic-as well as confessedly tentative.
