Word: earnestness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...next office, and manages to work references to her mangled love life into nearly every summation she delivers. She has fits in supermarkets because there are too few cans of Pringles. She answers the question "Why are your problems so much bigger than everyone else's?" with the earnest response "Because they're mine." When Ally gets any work done, how she keeps her job, why she thinks it's O.K. to ask her secretary why she didn't give her a birthday present--these are all mysteries. Ally probably wouldn't seem so offensive as an addition...
...accident that our favorite side characters are not the delectably evil Cancer Man (the architect of an imminent armageddon that FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully must stop) or even the beloved, bald Walter Skinner (their boss at the agency) but the Lone Gunmen, three earnest dorks who sometimes fight the future by hacking into a computer or peering into a microscope at a heretofore unknown virus...
...team doesn't face that kind of pressure yet, but expectations have been rising as soccer's popularity in America increases. Dooley, an earnest sort, is captain of the best American team ever, as evidenced by its knocking off world champion Brazil 1-0 in a friendly match earlier this year. Foreign-born players like Dooley, who played for the U.S. in the 1994 World Cup, combined with the fast-rising level of home-grown talent have turned the U.S. team from international doormat to contender. "The mix is good for competition within the team," says Steve Sampson, the first...
...down to nothing by TV. No one will mistake Chicken Soup for literature, and in case you miss the point, the cover blurb from Robin ("Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous") Leach is a clue that you're not buying Middlemarch. From book to book, the tone is unvarying: earnest, unadorned and ruthlessly uplifting. The stories are gathered under recurring rubrics--"On Love," "A Matter of Attitude," "Live Your Dream," "Learning to Love Yourself"--and deal with such universal themes as a mother's love, obstacles overcome, misunderstandings resolved, the cuteness of puppies and the boundless wisdom of children...
...black women, Aretha is the voice that made all the unsaid sayable, powerful and lyrical," the writer Thulani Davis once observed. "She was just more rockin', more earnest, just plain more down front than the divas of jazz...Aretha let her raggedy edges show, which meant she could be trusted with ours...