Word: humdrum
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...simple line map of the world, sketched in faded brownish ink on a single small (about 11 in. by 16 in.) sheet of patched and worm-eaten vellum seems humdrum. In reality, it is by far the most important cartographic discovery of this century. It is the first map (see below) ever found that shows any part of the Western Hemisphere before the voyage of Columbus...
Every housewife is entitled to hobby to help her escape the humdrum patterns of existence that raising children and watching hubby's waistline grow can engender. And writing is as constructive a pastime...
Anyway, Green Berets should be good for recruiting. Moore's Special Forces men seem to spend little time on the humdrum public health and education programs and antiguerrilla training that are among the SF's major responsibilities. Instead, they recruit pretty girls to lure Viet Cong officers to their bedrooms-to be captured, naked and panting, by the SF. They hire Cambodian bandits to ambush Viet Cong units in Cambodia, train Meo tribesmen to fight against the Communist Pathet Lao in neutral Laos...
Jean Untermeyer displays a persevering but uneven personality, one dedicated to passion and sensibility but continually drawn to the comforting but humdrum virtues of a tidy housewife. Her prose reflects this dichotomy, ranging from the limpest of cliches to flights of intuitive perception, as in her lines about Sylvia Townsend Warner: "Yet all is not wit, though it springs out from her as pointed as a prow. There is wisdom, as final as a proverb...
Coagulated Syrup. The company's longest single item is "The Post Office," a sort of Our Town story as Kafka might retell it. A dusty, creaky, self-important postmaster rubber-stamps his way through bizarre, touching and humdrum encounters with the town's citizens. At skit's end, the postmaster is walking around with an inverted wastebasket covering his head. Poof! The postmaster disappears, but the basket is still there. This is typical of the evening's pseudoprofundities-here today, and a basket case tomorrow...