Word: dourness
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...April, when Vice President Dick Cheney, whose task force drew up the plan, delivered a speech in which he seemed to mock conservation as a means of dealing with energy shortages. The attempt was to lay out the dire reality; the effect was to just sound dour. One sentence in particular - "conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy" - led to a wave of bad press and gave the administration's critics fresh ammunition to dismiss the plan as a sop to the oil, gas and coal...
...half devil, half angel, tempter and comforter. (Think Jeff Probst offering starving Survivors extra vittles in exchange for their tent.) Not so Anne Robinson of The Weakest Link (NBC, Mondays, 8 p.m. E.T.), a British import game show with a Survivor twist: players vote each other off. The dour, sarcastic host dismisses losers with a curt "You are the weakest link. Goodbye." (Thanks to NBC's weeks-long ad blitz, it may be the first TV catchphrase Americans have got sick of before its show even aired). But there's an integrity to her evil-Regis act. She mercilessly skewers...
...There are all kinds of unforeseeable and unintended consequences of what's going on," says Barton Biggs, chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. He's especially dour on the economy, saying corporate earnings will fall 20% this year and that before it's all over we will have a full-fledged recession with bouts of Japanese-style deflation. He's less worried about the stock market, though, believing a rally is imminent. (For more on his bearish view, see Personal Time: Your Money...
...dour Fed chief has had an awfully nice run. For the last few years, he's been feted as the crown prince of prosperity, treated as though his accountant's mug should be chiseled on Mount Rushmore, and given the ultimate media accolade: a hagiographic book by Bob Woodward...
...some-such as the ever-dour Doris Lessing-charm is merely a wasteful veneer pasted over more meaningful pursuits. "What is charm then?" she asks and then replies: "Something extra, superfluous, unnecessary, essentially a power thrown away." Nor is she alone in this conviction. "Charm always issues," the choreographer Paul Taylor once commented dismissively during a Harvard lecture, "from some terrible emptiness...