ham-fisted 
adjective British informal
Clumsy; bungling: a ham-fisted attempt...
- WorldCom's in a big mess, and many of you have questions about it, so I thought that I would, in my ham-fisted, amateur way, attempt to answer them.
- It was an attempt - ham-fisted, but an attempt nevertheless - to interpret, in some Van Daniken kind of way, some of the phenomena, especially in the Old Testament.
- For the pro-war blood mongers to claim that they are the true supporters of our troops and that people such as myself of an anti-war disposition are not, is at best a ham-fisted attempt to take the moral high ground and at worst a barefaced lie.
Synonyms
clumsy, bungling, incompetent, amateurish, inept, unskilful, inexpert, maladroit, gauche, awkward, inefficient, bumbling, useless, unhandy
informal cack-handed, butterfingered, ham-handed
British informal all thumbs, all fingers and thumbs
Derivatives
ham-fistedly
- We get no sense of the Western society in which they live, apart from a ham-fistedly jolly counterplot about Ziad's friend running a pizza restaurant.
- Anakin's nightmare brought tittering and giggles even from me it was so ham-fistedly portrayed.
- In a world where most guitar groups regurgitate mouldy old ideas, floundering ham-fistedly around in a sea of stupidity and borrowed riffs, it's a relief to turn to this intelligent, confident and, dare one say it, tasteful record.
ham-fistedness
- Annoying as the album frequently is, it doesn't irritate through ham-fistedness or incompetence.
- Example of Saw's ham-fistedness - in one of the MANY achingly silly flashbacks, the police track the killer to his abandoned warehouse lair, the address of which is - STYGIAN STREET.
- On its own, the story would perhaps offer nothing more than an example of the Scottish Executive's increasing tendency to ham-fistedness.