Word: dullness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Despite such defects, the book is highly useful. It will suggest to the reader that the language of Soviet bureaucracy is simply the herd noise of a pack of exceedingly dull and humorless rogues. It also shows that international Communism has created a linguistic apparatus for a general attack on the whole logical structure of the Western mind-an attack which does not cease when Moscow talks peace...
...sudden uncooperative freeze. Noel turns eloquently nasty and, incidentally, states the main theme of the book: "Your name is Shirley," he tells Marjorie, "the respectable girl, the mother of the next generation, all tricked out to appear gay and girlish and carefree, but with a terrible threatening solid dullness jutting through, like the gray rocks under the spring grass in Central Park . . . What [Shirley] wants is what a woman should want . . . big diamond engagement ring, house in a good neighborhood, furniture, children, well-made clothes, furs-but she'll never say so. Because in our time those things...
...From Bing, of course, Frank borrowed the intense care for the lyrics, and a few of those bathtub sonorities the microphone takes so well. From Tommy Dorsey's trombone he learned to bend and smear his notes a little, and to slush-pump his rhythms in the long dull level places. From Billie Holliday he caught the trick of scooping his attacks, braking the orchestra, and of working the "hot acciaccatura"-the "N'awlins" grace note that most white singers flub...
...Moral Problem. Shaw's mother took up singing to help her through a dull and disappointing marriage, and it was not very long before young Bernard admitted "knowing much more about music than any of the great composers." He talked his way into a critic's job with a promise not to "write about Bach in B minor . . . I purposely vulgarized musical criticism, which was then [1888] refined and academic to the point of being unreadable...
...Yankee fan is a complacent, ignorant fat cat. [He has] been fed on victory and on great dull stars such as Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle, and even these men they do not appreciate...