Word: cliches
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Hope It's Not Contagious Re "Gaffes to the Rescue" [Feb. 19]: i wonder whether Michael Kinsley's imagined description of ABC executives' using "a crack of the whip" on the gaffe-prone African-American actor Isaiah Washington was simply an unfortunate use of a cliché or evidence that even those who take it upon themselves to analyze gaffes are still subject to perpetrating them. I agree with Kinsley that we should all be able to shrug off the stupid things people say (or write), but I found his use of a potent image of slavery in this context...
...Skiing is possible in Lebanon because the swift rise of the coastal mountain range, coming after the broad expanse of the open Mediterranean, creates updrafts that keep the high country cold even when it might be 60 or 70 degrees at the shore. While the old tourism industry cliché that in Lebanon you can go alpine skiing in the morning and water skiing in the afternoon might be technically true, I don't know anyone who's tried. Even in late March (which is about as long as the ski season lasts) the sea is too cold for much...
...veiled lament for its passing. The glib assumption one first makes of Peter Moss's No Babylon-coming as it does from British Hong Kong's former propaganda chief-is that it will be the kind of memoir any undergraduate seminar could destroy in minutes, excoriating an Orientalist cliché here, seizing upon a political or gender bias there. In fact, the book is nothing of the kind. Moss has an acute sense of separateness from the colonial hierarchy of which he was officially a part, stemming, one soon reads, from his Anglo-Indian ethnicity and his sexual orientation...
...Georgia, U.S. Severgnini's Italia Beppe Severgnini's new book, Label-La Figura, provides a good way to understand Italy [Aug. 28]. He's the best person to describe the highs and the lows of our country. Most books on the subject drown readers in a sea of awful clichés. Since Severgnini has traveled all over the world, he can draw fair comparisons on how we see our society and how it is seen outside our borders. I'm not really patriotic, but your review somehow made me a little prouder of being Italian, with all the pros...
...comfortable - but in a way, chick lit has never been totally comfortable with itself. As a genre it sets itself the task of chronicling the (literarily underserved) lives of contemporary single women - but then, all too often, it suffers a failure of nerve and settles for regurgitating exactly the clichés about boys and shopping and cattiness that it should be rectifying. "I almost feel like the premises of plenty of chick-lit books are ones that I would love to read!" Sittenfeld says, exasperated. "It's almost like they're not seen as worthy of intelligent treatment." Funnily...