Word: dullness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...daily press is not pacing the growth of the country. Since 1950, he said, morning papers have registered a 10% circulation increase, afternoon papers 8%, against an increase of 15% in the number of U.S. households. ¶ Foreign news reporting, said Ed Stone of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, "is dull and sterile for the most part. We're not reporting on the people out where the people are . . . Hard news has come to mean hard to digest, hard to read and hard to get anybody to understand. I submit that foreign news is becoming local news, and unless...
...dangerous hobby, however, likely to lead an author into arid jiggery-pokery. Probably both directors were wise in refusing to sacrifice to it the excitement we derive from watching people act and suffer onstage, rather than dream-phantoms. A proudction directed along Genet's lines might easily be bloody dull, but since Genet is to a great extent liberated from our values, there is no telling what might come into his mind. Perhaps dullness was for some reason his intention. Well, Genet has all sorts of intentions with which the rest of us cannot be expected to sympathize...
Britain's socialists, dedicated opponents of wealth and high birth, helped to get things going, Young reports, but they nearly ruined everything by insisting that equality of opportunity meant educating all children, bright and dull, in the same comprehensive schools (this, very roughly, is what the Labor Party currently proposes). Clearly, this plan was too American, writes Young: "Americans, far from prizing brainpower, despised it . . . In the continent of the common man, they established common schools which recognized no child superior to another." Another kind of education was necessary for Britain; "Englishmen of the solid centre never believed...
Shifting IQs. Periodic intelligence testing gave parents of dull children the hope that their dimwitted offspring would blossom late; and tests taken throughout life ensured that when IQ went up-or down -jobs changed accordingly. Mere age, of course, commands no respect in a meritocracy; as IQ dips in the fifth or sixth decade of life, Young writes, "the managing director had to become an office mechanic . . . the professor an assistant in the library. There have been judges who have become taxi drivers, bishops curates, and publishers writers...
...funniest and one of the saddest books that will be published this year"), but in a daily Times review, Orville Prescott contradicted her: "There are two equally serious reasons why it isn't worth any adult reader's attention. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull . . . The second is that it is repulsive...