Word: prosaic
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...Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1834, and partly raised in Russia, where his father, an engineer, was designing the St. Petersburg-Moscow railroad for Czar Nicholas I. Doubtless the Russian fixation on rank impressed him; in any case, he began to insist quite early in his life that he was no prosaic Yankee, but a Southern gentleman from Baltimore, Maryland. He enrolled at West Point, but was flunked in 1854 for his cluelessness about chemistry. "Had silicon been a gas," he would say later, "I would have been a major-general...
Grinspoon's account of the drug's effects are both scarier and, somehow, more prosaic: "Micropsia and macropsia (or megaplosia) have been frequently reported [as well as] the sensation that [people and objects] are rushing toward [the user] at tremendous speed, increasing in size as they approach." He doesn't mention that this peculiar sensation can happen stone-cold-sober when trying to get an autograph at Disney World. I was seven. I was so excited. I walked right up to the Mouse and thrust a pen in his face. Suddenly, I heard a disconcertingly masculine voice emanating from...
...decision to performs both operas in Englishis commendable, and the translated texts are clearand effective. Jefferson Packer's lively renderingof La Rondine--done, presumably, for thisperformance--is a bit prosaic at times, perhaps inan attempt to temper the sentimental excess of theoriginal...
Even such seemingly prosaic but once deadly infections as staph and strep have become much harder to treat as they've acquired resistance to many standard antibiotics. Both microbes are commonly transmitted from patient to patient in the cleanest of hospitals, and they are usually cured routinely. But one strain of hospital-dwelling staph can now be treated with only a single antibiotic -- and public health officials have no doubt that the germ will soon become impervious to that one too. Hospitals could become very dangerous places to go -- and even more so if strep also develops universal resistance...
...more prosaic technical and political discussion groups, meanwhile, have become so crowded with writers crying for attention that a Darwinian survival principle has started to prevail. "It's so competitive that you have to work on your style if you want to make any impact," says Jorn Barger, a software designer in Chicago. Good writing on the Net tends to be clear, vigorous, witty and above all brief. "The medium favors the terse," says Crawford Kilian, a writing teacher at Capilano College in Vancouver, British Columbia. "Short paragraphs, bulleted lists and one-liners are the units of thought here...