Word: cliches
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Mahler had few good words for his contemporaries. Of Puccini he said (after a performance of Tosca): "Nowadays any bungler orchestrates to perfection"; of Sibelius: "The most hackneyed clichés were served up with harmonizations in the 'Nordic' style"; and of Strauss: "A heap of slag...
Even before Matthew Arnold brooded thus on Dover Beach in 1867, many Christians had been oppressed by a belief that Christianity was in a perhaps fatal decline, ailing within and sore beset from without. Indeed, the Dim View has been and is almost a cliché in press and pulpit...
...dramatic, or even melodramatic force to a timely theme. In its casual moments it was flaccid, in its crucial ones unreal. Playwright Anderson's small army of bit parts had an effect of shambling vaudeville. His main story became a hollow study of two people speaking high-busted clichés. Too often, as in the past, he slubbed words into what was neither poetic language nor human speech...
...Technicolor Western, they decided they wouldn't spare the horses. They didn't: the picture cost $1,400,000. They thought it might be a good idea to incorporate all the time-tested chestnuts they could think of. They were confident that stringing all the horse-opera clichés together and playing them straight would be parody enough. Explains Fessier: "We grooved the tongue in the cheek. Why pull punches? We gave them everything...
...young lovers Randolph Scott and Barbara Britton make for the altar. All this and more is accomplished without teeth-clenched daggers, plank-walkings, or hoistings of the Jolly Roger. But this new version has not enough energy and inventiveness to take the place of the old, dependable pirate-movie clich...