lumberingness

English

Etymology

From lumbering +‎ -ness.

Noun

lumberingness (uncountable)

1. The quality of being lumbering; awkwardness, ponderousness.
   • 1861, Matthew Arnold, On Translating Homer: Three Lectures Given at Oxford‎^[1], London: Longman, Green, Longman & Roberts, Lecture III, p. 80:

     […] the English translator […] must not follow the model offered by Mr. Longfellow in his pleasing and popular poem of Evangeline; for the merit of the manner and movement of Evangeline, when they are at their best, is to be tenderly elegant; and their fault, when they are at their worst, is to be lumbering; but Homer’s defect is not lumberingness, neither is tender elegance his excellence.

   • 1869, Topics of the Day. A Forecast of the Session, The Spectator, Volume 42, p. 188, 13 February, 1869,^[2]

     […] the one doubt in the public mind as to parliamentary government, the one cause which is so visibly alarming to the “philosophers” who influence the masses, is the excessive, sometimes the intolerable, lumberingness of its action.

   • 1933 September, H[erbert] G[eorge] Wells, “Language and Mental Growth”, in The Shape of Things to Come, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, →OCLC, 5th book (The Modern State in Control of Life), page 417:

     One can feel little doubt about the increasing delicacy and precision of expression to-day if we compare a contemporary book with some English classic of the eighteenth or nineteenth century. That is still quite understandable to us, but in its bareness and occasional ineptitudes it seems halfway back to the limitations and lumberingness of Early English or Gothic.