Word: dulling
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Sirs: I am inclosing a clipping from the Dayton Journal. The morning newspaper which printed the story, unlike its sister afternoon headliner the Herald and Jimmy Cox's* News, is usually quite unsensational, commonplace, dull and unimportant?it seldom "probes" or "raps." I do not think it even prints an annual sea-serpent story. So much for the implied authenticity of the story. PAUL...
...biographical romancing upon two fruitless subjects out of the three chosen. The power remains admirable, but the reading palls. The young Goethe's windy sentimentality for Charlotte Buff is shown translating itself into that sweet and sticky opus, The Sorrows of the Young Werther. Other chapters demonstrate the dull phenomenon of Mrs. Siddons, a British beauty with the spirit of a bourgeois curate, rising to histrionic heights on emotional wings supplied by the death of her asthmatic daughter-shallow and caddish Painter Thomas Lawrence being lugged in to emphasize the inferiority of the Siddons-Kemble strain. The one study...
Their receptiveness, their spontaneity, must be dull indeed if they fail to be ecstatic over "To Helen," "Ulalume," "Lenore," "Annabel Lee," "The Bells, " "The Haunted Palace," "Israfel" and the crowning glory of "The Raven," or they would not glibly drop such sentences as "two-fifths sheer fudge...
...trombones. There were cool costumes and warm dancing. In fact there was everything but wit. So tremendous was the show that the lack of laughter glared ominously. The elaboration bore down upon the spectators' sensibilities and became oppressive. Accordingly, The Great Temptations stood forth as an exceptionally dull revue. It is not impossible that the producers may hurriedly purchase jokes and humorists in abundance and lighten up their handiwork. In such a case the show should be an enviable success; at present it is a lazy heavyweight. Miller and Lyles, colored comics, obliged with a few jokes. Hazel Dawn...
Thus is the chief advantage of slang, its originality, lost completely. Phrase after-phrase follows the imitative route to a dull oblivion. As a remedy for this stultifying condition, a simple moderation offers itself. And if the College composition courses can safely manoeuvre between the chill formality of Pater's stately sentences and the mongrel style of the streets, a Harvard man may yet produce the great American novel...