cockeyed

comparative more cockeyed · superlative most cockeyed · alternative cock-eyed

1. Having both eyes oriented inward, cross-eyed.
2. Crooked or askew.

   The Velcro closure of one sneaker had come loose and stuck up like a cockeyed tongue.

   2008, Stephen King, Just After Sunset

   1 more example

   1950, Langston Hughes, Simple Speaks His Mind, Chapter 12, in The Early Simple Stories, The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Volume 7, edited by Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper, University of Missouri Press, 2002, p. 60–61, This morning I paid seventy cents for two little old dried-up slivers of bacon and one cockeyed egg.

3. informalAbsurd, silly, or stupid; usually used in reference to ideas rather than people.

   I'm not going to go along with your cockeyed plot.

   2 more examples

   As time went on, and the desultory rifle-fire rattled among the hills, I began to wonder with increasing scepticism whether anything would ever happen to bring a bit of life, or rather a bit of death, into this cock-eyed war.

   1938 April, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter III, in Homage to Catalonia, London: Secker & Warburg, →OCLC

   While he [Bob Dylan] spent six decades singing about heartache, apocalypse and betrayal, a cockeyed humor has always informed his bleak worldview.

   2021 May 24, Jason Zinoman, “Happy Birthday, Bob Dylan, Our Most Underappreciated Comic”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

   Synonyms: absurd, Laputan, cockamamie, farcical, foolish, full of it, irrational, inconsistent

4. Drunk.

   In the private office he said, "Mr. Barrow, I was going to quit." "Don't do that, son! You're the only executive I've got that isn't cockeyed all the time! […]"

   1934, Sinclair Lewis, chapter 12, in Work of Art, New York: P.F. Collier & Son, page 166

   Synonyms: Adrian Quist, adrip, aled up, all mops and brooms, arseholed, a sheet in the wind, a sheet in the wind's eye, bedrunken