Word: drabs
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...river front of drab wooden huts had become a gaudy stage. Against the mighty backdrop of brown and grey gorges and leaping yellow waters the lean boatmen hopped and screamed like jays. Above their ragged blue trousers they wore emblazoned shirts. They had daubed yellow pigment on the heads of their boy helpers. They had oiled the keels of their long craft to maker them swifter. Now they waited for the starting signal...
This Happy Breed, a cavalcade of lower middle class life in a London suburb between two wars, is an attempted salute to the common man. Extending from 1919 to 1939, it tells the sometimes drab story of the durable Gibbons family, their births, marriages, deaths, their small joys and fair-sized sorrows. Rich in accurate observation, and at moments funny, it is lean on drama and lacking in depth. No British Chekhov or even Odets, Coward has the wish to be a serious dramatist without the wherewithal. A born sophisticate, he is at ease on figure skates, but slightly awkward...
...catalogue is paradoxical in content. Minus eighty-one pages and the drab grey cover of last year, it represents a definite abridgement of the courses offered by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Some have been eliminated entirely while others have of necessity been confined to the summer or fall or spring semesters. But the green-bound pages, in more optimistic aspect, furnish concrete evidence that too many tears have been shed prematurely over the bier of Harvard's liberal tradition. Courses in the humanities still abound, with even unlooked-for additions...
Rule 3. He must be healthy and vigorous. He should be at ease with a fishing rod and shotgun; if possible, he should walk to work. Voters do not like to think of their President as a man subject to such drab ailments as the sniffles...
...hero and heroine are thoroughly drab; the comic characters are far more interesting. The villain dominates the proceedings, but it is doubtful whether he is a serious or a comic character. One moment he is a brutal, psychopathic murderer who keeps pictures of nekkid women on his walls. The next moment, the best sequence in the show, he is made fun of in a riotous song. "Pore Jud Gray Is Dead." Two minutes after Jud has accidentally killed himself in a fight with the hero, the lovers ride off singing the hit song, "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning...