Word: prosaic
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...distinguished speaker used ancient techniques to win what even he knew to be a hostile audience, but his tools were too crude and prosaic to accomplish the job. To demonstrate his own friendliness, he grandly asked--nay, pleaded--that everyone visit his great state and see the unparalleled wonders of its progress. To identify his cause with the heritage of his listeners he solemnly invoked irrelevant parts of Massachusetts' history. He threw in the names of Jefferson, Webster, Washington and others, not in the context of sentences, but as stark monuments to the Americanism of his views. He intoned them...
...good fourth of the film is spent in tracing foot motions through bars, murky corridors, sleezy alleys. Even symbolism raises its heavy head: a train rushes by into the night as the prelude to the crisis scene between Shirley and Weir in his bedroom. The dialogue is so prosaic that it is often funny; a tense verbal duel in bed between Olivier and Signoret got more laughs than the presumably witty "Arabic" interchange in Manchurian Candidate...
...primary fight against Zelenko offered the Reform movement their most severe challenge, and a most significant victory. Zelenko, a prosaic Congressman with a very spotty attendance record in Congress, had parlayed Tammany endorsement into an eight year stay in Washington. Thrown against another Democrat, Zelenko chose to test the limits of acceptable liberalism. He warned Catholics that Ryan opposed federal aid to parochial schools. He challenged Ryan's call for the admission of China to the U.N., and described him as pro-Castro (Ryan had warned against the Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961. Recently he supported the President...
...prosaic moniker alongside such inspired noms de dishabille as Gaza Stripp, Helen Bedd, and the ecclesiastical ecdysiast. Norma Vincent Peel...
...manuscripts. In Psalm 2, for example, "Tremble before him and kiss his feet in homage" will replace a serious misinterpretation in the King James Version: "Rejoice with trembling. Kiss the son, lest he be angry." Job's picturesque "If I wash myself with snow water" becomes the prosaic "If I wash myself with soap," on the ground that snow water has no extra-special cleaning power. Until the scholars can think of a better word for it, Miriam's leprosy (in Numbers 12:10) will become "a disease of the skin"; what she really had, says Driver...