Word: prosaic
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...relation to holding out, Browne builds up to the expected finale. "Hold On Hold Out," the result of a collaboration with pianist Craig Doege, urges Browne's omnipresent You to keep holding out. As all rises in a mightily orchestrated (or engineered) crescendo, the lyric breaks into a prosaic, namby-pamby identification of Browne himself as a hold-out too, wanting to fly. But just as the cyclamates reach the carcinogenic threshold, and Browne declares for the first time in a song, "I love you...," he lets himself and the listener off the hook, waving his true Satyric colors: "Well...
...film using them to invigorate and give meaning to a story's more casual, empty, expository sections. A good deal of the direction in Dressed to Kill appears awkward or perfunctory. Shot for shot, through patches of inaction and weaker stretches of suspense, the movie advances with a clumsy, prosaic quality--not unlike the flat-footed style of Kubrick's The Shining, which DePalma, in a recent interview, says he detests...
...eyes. "But equally powerful was Teacher's reliance on Helen to keep her misanthropic impulses under control and to give her a sense of purpose in life." Annie saw and spoke for Helen; Helen loved and protected the woman she called Teacher in return. Their relationship was at once prosaic and parasitic. With Annie's death, Helen wrote a close friend, "For a while, I feel as if I had lost the eyes and ears within my limitations. It is as if all objects dear to my touch and paths familiar to my feet had vanished...
...Benjamin Disraeli really exist, or was he the figment of somebody's imagination? He was a dandy at a time when people were wearing black. He was a romantic in a prosaic age. He wrote best-selling novels while everyone around him was writing political tracts. Most important of all, he was by birth a Jew in an era when practicing Jews were legally barred from entering the British Parliament. Yet he was twice Prime Minister, a favorite of Queen Victoria's and a dominant figure in British politics for almost four decades...
There is no question that we all have a responsibility to change the society that produces such violence and to do it by making ourselves heard, as Mr. Collins has done, in conspicious ways. But are we not also responsible for smaller, more prosaic acts of responsibility such as making use of the existing structures designed by the University for the protection of its students from the ugliness of the outside world? Or is it that the use of such structures implies the counterrevolutionary concession that they exist? Peter Dale Senior Tutor of Adams House