limberness

1828, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, A Treatise on Gymnasticks (Die Deutsche Turnkunst, 1816), translated by Charles Butler, Northampton, Mass.: Simeon Butler, Section Three, p. 154, Every boy, or youth, who has not exercised before, is either entirely stiff, or if he possesses some limberness, he rarely understands to execute a regular movement.

To achieve so desirable an end, its leaders are ready to coalesce, here with the Douglas, and there with the Breckinridge faction of that very Democratic party of whose violations of the Constitution, corruption, and dangerous limberness of principle they have been the lifelong denouncers.

1860 October, James Russell Lowell, “The Election in November”, in The Atlantic Monthly, volume VI, number 36, page 496

The walls shook easily, but the tapia grass and bamboo strips had given them an astonishing resilience; so that although for the next six years Mr Biswas never ceased to feel an anxiety when someone leaned on the walls or flung sacks of sugar or flour against them, the walls never fell down, never deteriorated beyond the limberness in which he had found them.

1961, V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas, Vintage International, published 2001, Part One, Chapter 4