a. Also 8 -daysical, 9 -daisycal. [f. LACKADAISY + -IC + -AL.] Resembling one who is given to crying ‘Lackaday!’; full of vapid feeling or sentiment; affectedly languishing. Said of persons, their behavior, manners and utterances.
1768. Sterne, Sent. Journ. (1775), I. 61. (Pulse), Sitting in my black coat, and in my lack-adaysical manner, counting the throbs of it.
1807. Anna Porter, Hungar. Bro., vi. (1832), 77. What do you cast up your lack-a-daisical eyes at, Forshiem?
1818. Hazlitt, Eng. Poets, vi. (1870), 146. No man has written so many lack-a-daisical … verses as he.
1834. Beckford, Italy, I. 357. Lackadaisical loitering on the banks of the Arve.
1852. R. S. Surtees, Sponge’s Sp. Tour, lxviii. 384. The … lackadaisical misses whom he could love or not, according to circumstances.
1870. L’Estrange, Miss Mitford, I. v. 149. They [Miss Seward’s Letters] are affected, sentimental, and lackadaisical to the highest degree.
Hence Lackadaisicality, Lackadaisicalness, the quality of being lackadaisical; Lackadaisically adv., in a lackadaisical manner.
1823. New Monthly Mag., VII. 169. They conceive the eternal … lackadaisicalities touching the matter of Walter Scott’s ‘more last dying words.’
1828. Miss Mitford, Village, Ser. III. (1863), 59. Her father’s odd ways … and her mother’s odd speeches, and her sister’s lack-a-daisicalness.
1829. Lytton, Devereux, II. iv. ‘I think I am,’ reiterated the dead man, very lackadaisically.
1851. D. Jerrold, St. Giles, xii. 121. He stands … with one leg drawn up, and his ten fingers interlaced lackadaisically.
1887. Pall Mall Gaz., 17 Sept., 13/2. If Ministers refuse replies … Don’t charge them with … lackadaisicality.
