Word: leaden
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...mark is perennial top seed DeLillo, above right, whose Falling Man is about a lawyer who escapes the Twin Towers, wanders uptown in a daze and moves in with his estranged wife. DeLillo's tone is crushingly earnest--has he made a joke since 1985? His characters speak in leaden faux profundities, and they're so sunk in post-traumatic ennui you can barely tell them apart. One day a great novel will rise from the ruins of the Twin Towers, but it's not Falling...
...Bush left Andrews on Air Force One under low, leaden skies and landed at Roanoke under high, blue ones. Where Washington was cold and still wintry, the countryside between Roanoke and Blacksburg, viewed below on the helicopter ride to the Virginia Tech campus, was basking in sun and warm air. The contrast continued in Blacksburg, where the massive auditorium seemed ready not for a memorial, but for a college basketball game. It was packed to the rafters with chatting students, most in orange or maroon shirts or hoodies bearing the Virginia Tech logo. The rafters themselves were hung with banners...
...time might be ripe for Cameron. Blair has said he'll step down before the fall. His presumptive successor, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, is saddled by a more leaden style, a darker visage and a government that is losing popularity, largely because of the mess in Iraq. But Brown does not have to call an election until 2010, so Cameron can't rely on the war to deliver 10 Downing Street to him. Every second week he makes a foray from what he calls "the Westminster bubble" to some farther-flung outpost of the kingdom, meeting as many...
...something familiar about her ponderous tribute: she was lifting the best line of her husband's 2004 Democratic National Convention speech. She memorialized Martin Luther King Jr.'s widow as having risen from her grief after his assassination to tell the civil rights movement, "Send me." It was a leaden version of the "send me" riff with which Bill had electrified the crowd in Boston two years ago, describing John Kerry's Vietnam service. "She doesn't have his touch," says one of their oldest friends. "My recommendation would be that they not campaign together...
...ceremony was "wonderfully quiet, earnest, and solemn," Douglass noted. There was a "leaden stillness about the crowd" as Lincoln delivered his address, and Douglass thought it sounded "more like a sermon than a state paper." After the ceremony he went to the reception at the White House. As he was about to enter, two policemen rudely yanked him away and told him no persons of color were allowed to enter. Douglass said there must be some mistake, for no such order could have come from the President. The police refused to yield, until Douglass sent word to Lincoln that...