Word: humdrum
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...this aerial activity has disheartened Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the apostle of the "friendly Arctic." Polar exploration is not what it used to be, he laments, and he is going to quit. Modern inventions, safety and comfort have lessened the joy of the venturesome explorer and it is now a humdrum sort of job. Stefansson believes the Shenandoah will attain her goal without mishap...
...Roget or the two unfortunates in the Rue Morgue, one must wonder if under the veneer of civilization each person is not an incipient head-hunter. But the conclusion does not necessarily follow. To the average man, if there is such a creature, life is only too mechanical and humdrum. It would be an overdose of ippecac to ask such a man to read nothing but political and church news. When he reads about a murder, he identifies himself with the villain or the victim, he hears the gun crack, and thus he gets his daily thrill...
...Crossing Arizona in the morning and flying low to get their bearings anew, they piloted their Fokker T-2 in a country of forests, ravines and canyons, treacherous air currents, and at one point flew most dangerously between the walls of a deep canyon. Yet they pronounced their flight " humdrum," and landed in perfect condition-except for hearing slightly affected by the continuous roar of the motor...
...quite all the globe has become humdrum yet. While reviewers are declaring that O'Brien's pictures of South Sea glamour are mere imaginative fiction, and while Cruises of the Kawa are making them, seem ridiculous, stories like this are unconsciously being enacted to prove the case for romance. Stevenson and Richard Harding Davis had nothing more improbable to recount, and their best efforts failed to give the touch of credibility which is carried in a newspaper paragraph like this. As long as there are still truths stranger than fiction, there is hope for the survival of the "dime novel...
...exactly ugly, but not very beautiful. The author has too sympathetically buried them in obscurity. Need I add that Beranger is supposed to symbolize Poetry, as Deburan symbolizes Dramatic Genius, and Pasteur, Science? I think that it would have been possible to find some one more representative, less humdrum, than the author of "Lisette" and of the "Dieu des bonnes gens...