loose-handed

Etymology

Definitions

1. 1

   With open hand (as opposed to a fist).

   • His punches alternated between uppercuts and loose-handed swipes.
   • He was holding back, a little. The blows were loose-handed.
   • A diamond ring flashes as he gestures, not with the thrust of a clenched fist but with loose-handed waves.
2. 2

   Characterized by broad sweeping movements.

   • "When you are here," Martin cups the air vaguely in loose-handed gesture, "do you feel the freedom around you? Can you feel it?"
   • Varney made an impatient, down-sweeping, loose-handed gesture. "Quit it, Cole!" he said angrily.
   • The chain has a whipping action-like many of the loose-handed whipping motions of the Northern bare-handed styles.
3. 3

   Casual

   Casual; undisciplined or haphazard.

   • The rather loose-handed ways in which Wilson presented his history and the generalizations he dared to make are also visible in later years.
   • Miss Fidger was the most delightfully loose-handed housekeeper that ever muddled up baker's, butcher's, and washerwomen's bills in one indiscriminate mass.
4. ›+ 7 more definitionsshow fewer

   1. 4

      Lenient, permissive.

      • First, it was traditionally subject to loose-handed regulation, which opened the possibility of returns above the cost of capital to offset.
      • He was the most loose-handed husband possible with the marriage-reins with regard to every thing except money; and his wife had she been so minded, might have enjoyed any amount of questionable independence.
   2. 5

      Spendthrift, profligate.

      • I was so eager to make their bedclothes agreeable and nice, I am afraid I was a bit loose-handed with the starch bottle.
      • Lear may teach us to draw the line more clearly between a wise generosity and loose-handed weakness of giving;
   3. 6

      Aimless

      • I'm a model convalescent if I'm waited on by anonymous people whose job it is, but very bad at sitting loose-handed about our own small rooms.
      • Harmen Gerritszoon himself was not a moldered corpse nor an old man remembering, wordless and loose-handed, in the sun;
      • He's some loose-handed fellow with nothing to do.
   4. 7

      Wild or uncontrolled.

      • In San Diego, at the zoo, this cousin's four-year-old son, left loose-handed by a gossipy mother, had been drawn between the bars and trampled on by a suddenly rogue elephant.
      • We had to hold our teams about half an hour until the immense herd passed. Men that were loose-handed fired many shots among them, and three bucks were killed.
      • That cutpurse of the ocean and his loose-handed crew were effectually cured of their ambition to colonize.
   5. 8

      Involving wrist action.

      • In which method of receiving the puck—with a fixed stick or a loose-handed stick—do you apply a bigger force to the puck?
      • Then some sand wedges—loose-handed flop shots, cut shots, back in stance, forward in stance, different kinds of lies in the sand bunker.
      • With the currently popular loose-handed grip, the wrist maintains a certain amount of flexibility.
   6. 9

      Sketchy and flowing rather than geometric and precise.

      • In a search for the complex shifts of form in the foot's shaping, the drawings present a loose-handed version of planar slices.
      • On the wall to his right, loose-handed paintings in dark, pungent red boasted familiar shapes; varied angles of human faces, mouths stretched open, lips curled back, eyes bulging, teeth clenched and grinding.
      • Smith not only replaced Warhol's purposely bland flavors with posole (white hominy) which is popular in the Southwest, she also replaced Warhol's clinical rendition of the can with a loose-handed drawing and applied a jolly background ....
   7. 10

      With a poor grip.

      • If Daklan had drawn the sword from his flesh then there would be more blood than he could have stanched, but Daklan was now stumbling away, loose-handed, then falling.
      • Exiting in the order of their deaths: Senhora Teixeira, holding her unlit torch loose-handed, helping Maria Elena up the stair.
      • That night at supper we heard the crash from the kitchen. "Well," said Amos, for I went on eating, "there you are. Loose-handed, just like I thought."

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