Word: humdrums
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Olympian View. For Juan Perón, such personal interventions have grown increasingly rare. Nowadays he prefers to cultivate an Olympian air that keeps him somewhat above the humdrum scene. When he steps forward, it may be for some such purpose as opening the Pan-American games, or announcing that an Argentine laboratory has produced atomic energy...
...citizen, an Anglo-Catholic, an earnest and pedantic scholar, Auden has become a kind of younger opposite number to T. S. Eliot. Like Eliot, he has lost the sympathy of many former admirers in his native land, who consider his expatriation and his orthodoxy a humdrum comedown for a promising poet...
...Paul Bowles, "The Sheltering Sky" and "The Delicate Prey" ("No moralist, I nevertheless feel crawly after reading stories in which a good healthy sexual relationship with a goat would be considered normal to the point of humdrum...
...Pseudo-intellectuals," says Levine bitingly, "who feel that they have identified themselves with Oxonians when they include eyether [in] their otherwise humdrum speech pattern are generally among those who condescendingly mimic these allegedly Brooklyn cockneyisms. How horrified they would be to learn that in England itself, their adopted home, educated speakers are guilty of the same barbarisms." Swallering is quite common among Britons, and even the best people refer to the Indiar Office. But, says Brooklyn's Levine, "it is not considered bad form in England...
...reading the drab little close-up of "real" life by someone signing himself "Enoch Arnold Bennett" could possibly see The Old Wives' Tale ahead. Max Beerbohm's A Defence of Cosmetics would seem to condemn its youthful author to remain a wishy-washy wordster forever. A humdrum little tale by Henry James, The Death of the Lion, gives no indication of the labyrinthine richness he was able to manage when he felt like it. To the contemporary eye, only George Gissing's grim story of spinsterhood, The Foolish Virgin, seems fit to rank with the best...