Word: cliched
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...stage their final showdown on the occasion of Mikali's greatest triumph, a concert in London's Albert Hall. The plot, as formally predictable as a minuet, diverts without disturbing. Higgins' prose is simple to the point of sketchiness. Sentences lack verbs-a lot of sentences. Clichés nudge the brain along well-worn paths: "That sixth sense that had kept him alive for so long now, scenting danger like some jungle animal. . ." Yet if it is impossible to believe any of this, it is hard not to enjoy it. And reading Solo is less strenuous...
...selected her, when she was eight, because of her grave intelligence and unusual looks. For her and the reader the cruel blow comes early: her real parents turn out to be murderers of the most melodramatic sort. For the rest of the story James must crawl back from a cliché that might have been assigned to her in a nightmare game of charades. That she does so is no small achievement, but she must use all the devices of suspense: obscene acts that are half-forgotten, split-timed suicide, public facts that are fortuitously hidden, a man who tirelessly...
...professional administrator that urged medical staffs to "take an aggressively penetrating approach to the communicative dimensions of the interfaces between institutions of medicine." Another example: "Birth weight and gestation were obtained for 245 deaths with congenital heart disease that were autopsied." They use cartoons to illustrate medical cliché: "the patient was explored"; "two days after admission, the patient was operated...
...first, Chilly Scenes of Winter, was filmed last year as Head over Heels, and her short stories have been collected in two books, Distortions (1976) and Secrets and Surprises (1979). Beattie, 32, writes with quiet wit and subdued sympathy about the states of mind that have become the clichés of middle-class malaise. One need not elaborate, except to say that after 30 years of postwar fiction, American writers appear to have reversed Tolstoy's happy-family dictum. It now appears that all unhappy families are alike...
...takeoff on 1930s movie musicals. Using Grauman's Chinese Theater as aspic, it captures the clichés, the formulas, the juicily idiotic emotional punch lines of the period. Singing with slyly ironic comic abandon, Jeanette MacDonald (Peggy Hewett) fondles a life-size cardboard cutout of Nelson Eddy, never the most mobile of performers...