18.He kept at this for a year, doing desultory writing on the side, with little success, and then one day an infelicitous incident peremptorily closed his newspaper career.
19.The boy Henry soon became a desultory reader of every book he found readable, but these were commonly eighteenth-century historians because his father's library was full of them.
20.When the shoe repair shop lost my boots, the clerk's search was so desultory and disorganized that I had to go through the shelves and find them myself.