Word: hoariest
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...some of Nunn's conditions, notably that any reductions negotiated would not take effect until separate talks under way in Vienna yield an agreement eliminating or at least lessening the Warsaw Pact's superior numbers in conventional troops and weapons. The West Germans have begun talking of the hoariest of all dodges: appoint a NATO committee to study what line to take toward short-range missile negotiations...
...hoariest cliches justifying timorous programming is that there is always someone in the audience who has never heard Beethoven's Fifth. "For the first-time viewer, you've got to have Bohemes and Toscas and Carmens," says Ardis Krainik, general manager of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, whose company this season had an unexpected hit with Glass's Satyagraha. "Those are the things they need to bring them back again." But is sheer repetition of a handful of staples the way to cultivate new audiences...
...Hollywood's hoariest traditions: when filmmakers start to tell a historical whopper they place a title card at the front of their picture, solemnly assuring us that what we are about to see is true. The ensuing lies are generally sanitizing, ennobling and inspirational. At the beginning of Walker, its creators cross their hearts and hope to die in the usual manner. But the lying that follows is of a grand and giddy kind -- the stuff of that rarest of movie genres, the mock epic...
...felled her uncle and the terror that followed as it hits all the members of her fictional family, whatever their politics. Hers is an evenhanded account told with much poignancy. Regrettably, however, the novel stumbles to a close when the author falls back upon one of Garcia Marquez's hoariest literary devices: the discovery of an old manuscript that predicts the family's whole history. Though Allende's debut is full of promise, she still needs to break away from the domination of her unwitting mentor before she can fully display her distinctive voice...
Sequestering incompatible people on islands, in hotels or at roadside hash houses under duress is one of the hoariest devices known to drama. Vide, The Admirable Crichton, Grand Hotel and The Petrified Forest. The notion is that some transcendent revelation will descend on these characters as they sit and stew. The only revelation to be gleaned from the bulk of Lanford Wilson's plays, starting with The Hot I Baltimore, is that his characters are circusy clones of people originally conceived by William Saroyan, Tennessee Williams and William Inge. Their common plaint is that life has failed them, whereas...