Word: ennui
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...vapid pick-up, a sick-sweet Bailey's sundae, and a frantically joyful party are not subtle devices; but they convey Waletzky's theme--aimlessness and Sunday-afternoon ennui--without themselves being aimless or boring. Sally is the aimless one. She has abandoned her commitment, and though that happens to be an East Cambridge rent project, it could as easily have been politics, creativity, or just another person...
...Tommies under his command is hot-tempered, brawling Gunner Danny O'Rourke, who defies ennui not with ambition but with fury. Nicol Williamson portrays O'Rourke as a sardonic, 20th century Ahab, ever raging against a malevolent creation. He sees barracks boredom as proof that God mocks man's aspirations, a daily confirmation of the absurdity of it all. Infuriated by Evans' platitudes, O'Rourke responds by plunging his fist into a stove and slowly squeezing the heat out of a burning coal...
Vocational training: the very phrase calls up the smell of plastic ashtrays, the clink of copper trinkets, the ennui of workshops crowded with delinquents manning lathes and squirting grease into crankcases. Vocational training should be a major source of steady employment for U.S. youths. Instead, it has become an educational junkyard for rejects from a college-geared society...
Boredom prompts men to take pride in goldbricking, inducing added ennui. Even the crack 120th TFS at Phan Rang has an accountant and a graduate in English slinging hash, a school principal pulling security guard, and a Denver assistant district attorney slaving as a clerk in the base legal office...
This threat, combined with mounting exasperation and ennui on both sides, finally forced an apparent settlement...