Word: dulling
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...abandoning his studies of Jewish family life, Roth also puts aside the literary techniques associated with--but of course not confined to--that type of writing. Rather than characterizing people through details such as revealing gestures and speech patterns, he presents unconvincing, over-simplified generalizations about them. He substitutes dull and predictable dialogue for the illuminating conversations in his earlier books. And rather than satirizing his characters subtly and skillfully, he indulges in painfully obvious satire. (This heavy-handed treatment may, of course, reflect the pressing concern about America which motivated the book.) Similarly, rather than painting the comedy which...
...Plow with Sound. Nostalgists still mourn for the days when most farm chores were handled by horses instead of horsepower, by men instead of machines. As Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman recently noted, they fear that the trend toward automation "will excise the soul from farming, destroy its joy, dull its satisfactions and chill the ageless intimacy between man and his land." This view notwithstanding, most farmers welcome machine-age relief from what Dr. Joseph Ackerman, managing director of Chicago's Farm Foundation, calls "farming by hunch and the Farmer's Almanac...
Summer is "the Season" in Greece, but this year it is dull. Tourism, Greece's main source of foreign exchange, is off by 50%. A decree forbidding five or more persons to assemble without prior police permission has all but killed Athens' social life. Many of the artists and troupes that were scheduled to perform at Greek festivals-including the Kiev Ballet and the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra-have stayed away. Some of Athens' theater audiences are peppered with relatives of army officers who get free tickets to keep the attendance up. Even so, the censors...
Castello quickly introduced reforms, but he went at his job like a surgeon with a dull knife. In a series of decrees, he tightened credit, cut government spending 30%, canceled ruinous import subsidies, and brought the rate of inflation down to 41% by last year. To clean out Communists and political corruption, he stripped almost 800 Brazilians of their political rights and abolished all political parties except for a catchall government party and a token opposition. To guard against any return to the old ways, he also wrote a new constitution that provided for indirect presidential elections by Congress...
Actually, there was no great struggle in the Lampoon this winter or anything like that. In short, the newly elected leaders (who had been de facto leaders for half the previous year) calmly drove many Lampoon members away, leaving no one but charming, neurotic insiders and the obtusely dull hangers-on. While this cultural revolution was underway this spring, the Lampoonproduced virtually nothing. Their "Movies Worst" issue, two months late for the first time in memory, failed even to produce the humor innate in the conventional forms of that issue...