Word: humdrum
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...picking up scraps of gossip, nattering the King's fat mistress, patching up quarrels between, Austrian supporters, suffering boredom, nervousness, tantrums and fears of revolution, then making fun of everybody and everything to Metternich. Because she did so with a mixture of malice, snobbishness, impatience, heartlessness and occasional humdrum housewifely humor, her private letters make a lively book, packed with characterizations that, a novelist could envy. Thus she describes the conversation of her diplomatic rival, the clumsy, ill-favored wife of the Austrian Ambassador: "Do you know the kind of woman who always wants to be the centre...
...cases at least the dapper little heir to the Wisconsin Progressive machine had apparently stuck his neck way out. The list had been compiled in large measure from questionnaires sent out to detective agencies. And some of their clients had used detectives, not for labor espionage, but for such humdrum matters as the discovery of petty pilferers...
...public opinion was incensed. Soon afterward, however, the British began little by little to be dazzled by the bursting glory of the New Deal. Their own Cabinet, under the Rt. Hon. Stanley Baldwin and his budget-balancing Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain, began to seem a group of humdrum stick-in-the-muds compared to the spectacular humanism radiating from the White House. During much of the short reign of Edward VIII those British subjects who admired what they considered His Majesty's spectacular humanism saw in this spirit something their whole kingdom should copy from the United...
Superbly photographed, "The Prisoner of Zenda" does not devote itself to love and intrigue alone; many scenes are salted with a humor that is as dashing as the theme. Anyone with red blood in his veins can find a splendid opportunity for escape from the humdrum ways of a modern world by visiting the University...
Those who figure that an author's abilities should at least keep pace with his public's have had their calculations upset by Author Masters' post-Spoon River performances. Thirty-two generally humdrum volumes of prose and verse have poured from his pen into the literary ocean, and have disappeared with faint gurgles barely audible to the public at large. But the sense of Poet Masters' potential ability lingers on; and to a loyal band of U. S. readers every new Masters book comes bound in hope as well as boards...