Word: characterless
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...same. (To its credit, or tenacity, the Press-Scimitar was wheezing "Forward, Memphis!" to its dying day.) Circulation fell from 127,000 in 1973 to "less than 80,000" this year. Downtown itself was turned into a mall to compete with suburban malls-the same kind of desperate and characterless rearrangement happening all over the country-and still suburbanites clung to the perception of a ubiquitous downtown scene as one in which a man with a wallet is being chased by a man with a brick. Landmark buildings began to disappear, as did, the other day, an old newspaper...
...unambitious rural retreat in which "it was impossible to believe that somewhere else the unpleasantness was going on." The troubles of Ireland are at a safe distance until one of their own number. Cynthia (whose husband the narrator sleeps with) hitherto considered to be rather weak and characterless--stuns them all with a vicious, almost raving outburst of pent-up emotions. A superbly crafted, extended passage has Cynthia confront her companions with the facts about themselves and a manic account of the viciousness, violence and pervasive sickness of the Irish conflict...
...shackled the fifth horse so clumsily as to make it chafe and bleed, explains that the animal has no purpose in life but to run, senselessly and painfully. Chulkaturin thinks of himself in terms of this story, for he and the fifth horse are both defined by an utterly characterless superfluity...
...Stoppard's play "two of the most marginal characters in Shakespeare"--the pair of characterless spy-schoolfellows who conspire with Claudius against the Prince--occupy center stage, talking arguing and waiting while the action of Hamlet swirls incomprehensibly around them...
...sitcom / Dream ofJeannie. He plays the villainy sotto voce and the humor-the infectious delight J.R. brings to the business of malevolent one-upmanship-fortissimo. He struts, whinnies, talks out loud to himself; he has a grand time being bad. His soft, smooth, surprisingly characterless face expresses J.R.'s childishness; but those huge blue eyes testify to ages of suffering given and received. He is the man we love to hate. J.R. and Hagman deserve the country's gratitude for lighting up Friday nights with that barracuda smile...