thumby

Example Sentences

• ""Well, I don't tease anybody but the men. I don't tease father or mother or you,—but men are fair game; they are such thumby, blundering creatures, and we can confuse them so.""
• "[…] he was propounding an improvement of Professor Armstrong's Heuristic method, whereby at the cost of three or four hundred pounds' worth of apparatus, a total neglect of all other studies and the undivided attention of a teacher of exceptional gifts, an average child might with a peculiar sort of thumby thoroughness learn in the course of ten or twelve years almost as much chemistry as one could get in one of those objectionable shilling text-books that were then so common…."
• "The box was set down, the stiff buckles of its mildewed straps tackled by a dozen thumby hands, the lid hurled back."
• "For as long as we have known him—and for most of us that has been for the lengths of our lifetimes—he has been the object of, and inspiration for, a delight so innocent and perfect that the attempt to analyse its sources seems an act of ingratitude, a laying on of thumby hands that will inevitably bollix the job."
• "Some people are handy, but I am (no other word fits) thumby. The handy learn to master each moder machine as soon as it hits the market. The thumby never graduate beyond the self-service island at the gas station."
• "2015, Julie Lawson, A Ribbon of Shining Steel: The Railway Diary of Kate Cameron, Yale, British Columbia, 1882, Dear Canada series, Scholastic Canada, https://books.google.ca/books?id=h1X2CQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false Rachel was all thumbs when it came to embroidery, even thumbier than me."