incompetence

From French incompétence, equivalent to in- +‎ competence.

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incompetence (usually uncountable, plural incompetences)

1. Inability to perform; lack of competence; ineptitude.

   Hyponym: weaponized incompetence

   • 1851 November 14, Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC:

     ... at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals--morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck

   • 1949 June 8, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel, London: Secker & Warburg, →OCLC; republished [Australia]: Project Gutenberg of Australia, August 2001:

     Winston did not know why Withers had been disgraced. Perhaps it was for corruption or incompetence. Perhaps Big Brother was merely getting rid of a too-popular subordinate.

   • 1974, Ursula Leguin, The Dispossessed:

     The factory where she worked was a poisonous mass of incompetence, favoritism, and sabotage.

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