Word: flaccidities
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...redundant, to call one's novel a fable if it is in some way fabulous. But Baker's book is merely unendingly pretentious. Its action scenes are written in grunting prose that is supposed to be tough but instead is only sweaty, and its largo passages are flaccid with maundering soliloquies of the hero, a professor of literature who is awakening gummy-eyed from a dark night of the soul. Baker never writes a noun without leashing a seeing-eye adjective to it, never overlooks a cliché, never fails to labor an image ("The windshield wiper describing...
Slightly more than half the Yearbook's prose is the work of CRIMSON editors, and startling though the statistic is, I can't see that their contribution has helped much. Russell Roberts writes a flaccid chronicle of Harvard, which piles up innovation and anecdotes under each President's name in a singularly bloodless manner; our history, one would gather, is wholly lacking in continuities. Another introductory piece on Harvard's finances, this one boldly reprinted from the CRIMSON, likewise flows aimlessly along to nowhere...
While many of their colleagues at home grew flaccid in chairs guaranteed them by state contracts, in the U.S. they found a spirited and highly competitive atmosphere. They also found a rising climate of orchestral prestige...
...should all this happen? It happens because the College still seems to find unbearable difficulties in making a profitable distinction between professional scholarship and a more general education--or rather, when it does make this distinction, it lapses into flaccid indirection. Not that this is the departments' fault: outside of tutorial, departments are too busy to concern themselves specially with undergraduates. But granting this to be true, it is pure foolishness to give the special fields unregulated control over the most essential instruction of more than 300 Freshmen...
Lolita has lost her nymphet rating since she left the perverse and remarkable novel by Vladimir Nabokov, and the resulting film romance between a knowing, nubile teen-ager (Sue Lyon) and a middle-aged emigre (James Mason) is commonplace and flaccid. Peter Sellers provides much-needed comic relief...