Word: dullness
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...taken the Thorndike intelligence test. Six had scored high, six had scored low. The 603 scanners carefully examined each face, guessed at cranial capacities, studied brightness of eye, firmness of mouth, tried to separate the stupid from the brilliant. Two photographs they observed in particular. From one smirked a dull, stupid face with drooping lips and averted, timid eyes. Surely, said most of the examiners, this man must be a moron. In the other was a man with a straight glance, a high forehead, a pleasant expression. Here, said the examiners, was kin of genius...
...Boscawen," 1846, 5¢ dull blue...
...Bootlegger who sings nicely in the moonlight, accompanying himself on the guitar, meets a lonely girl from a private school, teaches her how to drink. Ousted from school, the girl visits Manhattan to find the Park Avenue home her mother has spoken of so often. It is a dull, wandering fiction, hardly made bearable by the good looks of Dolores (Mrs. John Barrymore) Costello. Most expected shot: the moment when the girl and her mother meet in a bar where the mother, who had lied about her high estate, has been swigging with sailors...
Dinner is Served. To Manhattan's dramatic critics, sneaking back to their kennels, scorched an unwholesome yellow by the country sun, this dull trifle was used as an excuse for bored and wintry sarcasms. It repeated, stupidly, the theatrical cliche of the wife who wanted her husband to love her and whose trite appetites were gratified through the complicating assistance of her husband's friend. Alan Mowbray, of Theatre Guild scrub casts, wrote it himself, a handicap which his histrionic ability was not sufficient to overcome...
Sherwood Anderson, storyteller, spoke on "The Newspaper and the Modern Age," explained he had become a small-town editor (Democrat and Smyth County News in Marion, Va.) because life was dull and vulgar in the Modern Age. "Newspaper writing is writing," he said. ". . . [it] can be as direct, as noble, as fine as any other kind of writing. It is a record, bad or good, of the passing pageant of life." He predicted: "I think that we in America will survive the machine age. Mankind could always stand what would kill a dog. . . . Drink or casual sex experiments will...