Word: prosaic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Israel's intercommunal war is steadily escalating. As in Lebanon, vigilante violence strikes innocents engaged in the most prosaic activities. As a result, people on both sides of the conflict have come to feel that even their individual survival hangs in the balance. Those who contend that the recent Palestinian attack on a bus full of civilians could be something other than a foretaste of future horrors are urged to recall that after 18 months of sticks and stones, the intifadeh command last month instructed its followers to "kill a settler or a soldier for every martyr of our people...
Only the venue has changed. Instead of Moscow, Renko must navigate the intricacies of the Polar Star, a huge Soviet factory ship plying the waters of the Bering Sea. Its mission is both prosaic and delicate. It must gather and process 50,000 tons of seafood to contribute to the nourishing of the Soviet people. But its suppliers, who do the actual fishing in exchange for cash, are American trawlers...
Dante's swingers spend eternity in pitch darkness and buffeting winds. The consequences of 19-year-old Andy's passions are more prosaic. Having got his girlfriend pregnant, he is forced to borrow abortion money from a 50-year-old matron who has been trying to seduce him. Keeping one woman from knowing about the other foreshadows a more elaborate predicament in Parent's early middle...
...would be easy to dismiss Miss Julie as just another battle-of-the-sexes play and forget that August Strindberg's compression of dramatic form, use of prosaic, everyday language and intense psychological probing were innovations a century ago. Fortunately, a talented North House cast restores the play's power...
...Romantic poetry, much of it about the glory of nature. Many people in this century voiced the same tender feelings on seeing the first images of the earth as viewed from the moon. The sight of that shimmering, luminescent ball set against the black void inspired even normally prosaic astronauts to flights of eloquence. Edgar Mitchell, who flew to the moon aboard Apollo 14 in 1971, described the planet as "a sparkling blue-and-white jewel . . . laced with slowly swirling veils of white . . . like a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery." Photos of the earth from space...