Word: blanded
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Many colleges, in turn, are looking suspiciously at the letters that come in. Harold Doughty, director of admissions at New York University, notes that "recommendations are more bland, less reliable and less frank." Says Richard Lyman, president of Stanford University: "Letters of recommendation, one suspects, have long been subject to a debasement of the coinage. And how-the drive to make them freely available to the persons about whom they are written seems perfectly designed to administer the coup...
...hero and the heroine, thrown together by chance at the outset, almost invaribly take an instant dislike to one another. Heyer's protagonists are all well-born and haughty, and nearly all are extremely strong-willed. Presented as fairly intelligent and mature, they would never do anything so bland and conventional as to fall in love at first sight--it usually takes 150 pages...
Basically, the film takes an absurdly simplistic caricature of traditional theories of mental illness--that anyone deviating from the bland norm should be locked up and lobotomized--and reverses it, adding no subtleties in the process. The result is a prescription that "order" is wrong and that "sub-normal twits and gibbering hunks of animality" should inherit the earth. Randle McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) arrives at a relatively quiet ward in a mental institution, where three-quarters of the patients are "voluntaries," and he proceeds to wreak havoc. The only crazy thing about him, he claims, is that all he wants...
SPIRIT: Frederick Wiseman's Welfare (PBS). With his customary cool compassion, TV's only great documentarian showed us not a bland and idealized portrait of what we have been but the inhumane and bureaucratized future that has already arrived for the poor and could dominate everyone's life by our 300th birthday...
Admissions officials contend that the Buckley law aggravated a trend in bland teacher and school recommendations, weakening their usefulness in providing that full picture. The more imprecise recommendations become, the more Harvard will be forced to rely on that objective data...