Word: humdrum
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When the sheer dailiness of ordinary life seems terminally humdrum, who has not entertained the fantasy? Just cut and run. Go somewhere else, find a clean slate, and start over. And this time, try to get it right. That relatively few people actually follow up on this impulse may testify to the power of inertia or the naggings of conscience, or to some tedious combination of both...
...voice, can easily lead to misunderstandings that are easy to cope with in person but take time--and money--when you're far away. Just to reassure Lezama, Mike and I got along quite well, thank you, when he was here last spring. And I'd take any humdrum dispute from those four months over a two-hour, ten-dollar phone call in which we succeed in sorting out some issue that never would have been a problem if we'd understood each other in the first place. People always have to talk out what's going on between them...
...political chapters, this tendency can lead to some pretty humdrum passages: "We held the first Freedom Day in the Hotel Crillon, in Lima, on Feburary, 6, 1988; the second, devoted to agrarian subjects, at the San Jose hacienca in Chincha on February 18; on February 26, in Arequipa..." For most readers, such moments will probably demand a greater interest in Peruvian affairs than can fairly be expected...
...addition, the card keys have spiced up the otherwise humdrum Quincy atmosphere. Now, students grin and giggle upon seeing the blinking green light that denotes an unlocked door (often after shrugging in exasperation when the first attempted swipe results in a sinister red signal...
...quickening pace and mounting numbers have reduced what often used to be , a spectacle into an almost humdrum event. Today few people in town other than Jack King, the local mortician, even know that an execution has occurred until they read about it the next day, buried on an inside page of the Huntsville Item. When a chubby killer named Richard Beavers got his lethal injection of sodium thiopental last week, the only noteworthy aspect of the event was its timing: late on the night of Easter Sunday. That might have provoked an outcry a few years...