quarter-hearted

comparative more quarter-hearted · superlative most quarter-hearted

1. idiomaticLess than half-hearted.

   She gave a halfhearted wave. He returned a quarter-hearted wave and went back to whatever he'd been doing before he spotted her.

   2008, Isabel Sharpe, As Good as It Got, page 148

   2 more examples

   […]complete with a back flap featuring a few curiously damning remarks of endorsement, as solicited and acquired from those 'name' poets and writers who have no compunction about commenting in public on their fellow-artists' works (customarily reserving their more deeply quarter-hearted commendations for their friends, suspected inferiors, foreigners, fly-by-night oddities, and toilers in another field), […].

   1955, J. D. Salinger, Rise High the Roof Beams and Seymour, page 148

   The trouble lay, it concluded, in a lack of institutional reforms, or rather, in the breakdown of quarter-hearted reforms, causing the price of rice, in spite of surpluses, to triple in three years.

   1974, Robert Katz, A Giant in the Earth, page 176