Word: dullness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Probably the best explanation for this chronic shortsight is simply that a studying undergraduate is an awfully dull subject. A student closing his book of Greek paradigms is far less interesting than one who goes to the club to break beer bottles, or one who goes down to the field to slap backs
Perhaps it is necessary for us to develop a special patience with the bright and sometimes irritatingly brilliant, a patience comparable to that which we have virtuously tried to have toward the dull. Perhaps it is needed that we be slow to label [as] "revolutionaires," or liberals in any unfavorable sense, those who have many ideas, including occasional disturbing ideas, instead of a mere comfortable few. Perhaps it were well if we preached as often on intellectual sloth as we tend to preach on intellectual pride...
...important corpse, and the novelist's tactic is to take each of the mourners and riddle them with small shot. The corpse is that of Joseph Benjamin Chapin, and with the possible exception of the hero of Trollope's John Caldigate, he is the most greyly dull character to rear his trim, neat, empty head into modern literature...
...chortled, bounced, sniggered and bugled. The family into which he was born was a platoon of all the talents. His kin include Burne-Jones (uncle), the pre-Raphaelite painter, Angela Thirkell (second cousin), the sad librettist of middle-class soap operas, a president of the Royal Academy and a dull cousin named Stan Baldwin who became Prime Minister...
...alcohol; with Bradbury, in The Jar, that end is only a beginning. There are 19 stories in this book, but the best of the lot is more rib-tickling than spine-tingling. The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse tells of a fellow called George Garvey, so indescribably dull and ordinary that he becomes the pet of an avant-garde group, as a symbol, apparently, of what is wrong with bourgeois U.S. They take to hanging out in his respectable apartment and quoting his unquotable bromides in their modish cold-water flats. Garvey beats the avant-gardists at their...