0 without a clear plan or purpose and showing little effort or interest:
She made a desultory attempt at conversation.
This group will wait in a kind of desultory silence, with little chatting, before the tea is handed into the room from the back.
The bodies are like plasticine, disjointed and collapsing under pressure, while the movements seem desultory and impersonal.
Identifying the established church in close scriptural analyses and involved textual exegesis was far more than a desultory application of convenient imagery or simile.
In fact, she works at far below her true capacity - she studies very little and makes desultory efforts - and is still richly rewarded.
Classrooms are, of course, sites of natural, or informal, or desultory conversation.
However irregular and desultory his talk, there is method in the fragments.
Soviet opera in the 1920s had been a desultory affair and was in urgent need of reform.
It is, moreover, somewhat desultory and impressionistic-as well as confessedly tentative.
