His place in most people's mental albums was provisional, with something like a dotted line around it — the image of someone saying something friendly over his shoulder as he heads for an exit.
It is all no-holds-barred, rushing, provisional gesture, something caught on the wing.
Obama's planned executive action could lead to millions of undocumented immigrants being allowed to stay and work legally on a provisional basis, something Republicans have decried as "amnesty" and called unconstitutional.
The phrase "presumptive nominee" clearly indicates something provisional.
As Blake describes it, there has always been something provisional, rather than planned, about his working life.
There is something provisional and undogmatic about the way "White Teeth" confronts large themes -- migration, cultural identity -- and knows to stop short of haranguing the reader.
Such images point to the subversive power of dandyism to reveal masculinity itself as a performance, as something provisional, open to reinterpretation, rather than a set of inherited characteristics fixed in the skin.
With no disrespect -- quite the opposite -- Mr. Schiff approaches Bach's score as something provisional: penciled in, perhaps, and awaiting final choices from among the many alternatives that a musical imagination seemingly contiguous with the composer's keeps supplying.
In his 1920 critique, "The Economic Consequences of the Peace," the celebrated University of Chicago economist Thorstein Veblen wrote, "the measures hitherto taken in the execution of this peace treaty's provisional terms throw something of an air of fantasy over Mr. Keynes's apprehensions".
The details are in a freshly published edition of Michael Crick's book Militant: the fact that as expulsions began, Corbyn struck a loud note of common cause from his part of the Labour left ("If expulsions are in order for Militant, they should apply to us too"), and was even the "provisional convenor" of something called the Defeat the Witch-Hunt campaign.
