Word: earnest
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...welcome this news. Legal issues aside, Judge Wright's ruling has saved us from a long, hot summer of tawdry trial revelations about the President's sexual history and anatomy and spared us the spectacle of a media feeding frenzy at Camp Little Rock concealed by a facade of earnest journalism...
Daniel works three days a week for a couple of hours at a time, but instead of the cheerful grins of Alice or the earnest persistence of Shorey, Daniel displays mostly bitterness to the people of Harvard Square...
While the younger breed wears striped clothing effortlessly, those of us who have been sporting plaid fashions since the early '90s may find the switch to stripes a tough transition to make. We're used to the earnest complexity of the tartan and the understated intricacy of black-watch. It's not easy to leave behind the gridded blues, greens, reds and yellows for the linear turquoise and black...
...every bookstore-cafe manages quite so well. The Trident Bookseller and Cafe, despite its earnest endeavors (colored chalk on blackboard slates announce the various esoteric sections; a sign in the window reads "Bonsai Trees for Sale"), cannot escape the implications of its gentrified location. Next to the incense and candles, the magazine rack presents yards of glossy new weeklies which the consumer is not even allowed to bring into the cafe. More egregiously, the cafe features a non-smoking section...
...novelist's other recurrent theme is race. But as a white American writing about blacks, a trick managed by Faulkner and few others, Banks seems too carefully respectful, an earnest '60s liberal. When Owen Brown realizes that he regards a black farmer as an equal but not wholeheartedly as a friend, his self-conscious queasiness seems oddly modern. Like Owen, the author has often been confounded by his good intentions. When Bob Dubois migrates to Florida in Continental Drift and has a love affair with a beautiful black woman, Banks sets aside his gritty naturalism, and that...