Word: stale
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...genius for attracting important people to her crusade. For 18 years the elegantly impoverished daughter of Renishaw lived in unfashionable Bayswater. Her literary teas Evelyn Waugh summed up tersely as "stale buns and no chairs." Yet what names eagerly scrambled up the dingy stairs to knock on her "nasty green door." T.S. Eliot, Ravel, Diaghilev, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, William Butler Yeats were among the Olympians one might have met at the Sitwells' salons...
...remember having looked at a Yearbook during my 20 years at Harvard. However, there is a first time for everything. This week some students asked me to read the Adams House section of the Yearbook, and I must tell you that I found the attempt at humor stale, offensive and inappropriate...
...gather that you have been surprised by the reaction this piece has stirred. Perhaps it will help if I explain my own attitude toward it and what I consider to be your insensitivity in allowing, it to be printed. Any joke when repeated too often becomes stale. When it is directed at particular groups of people over and over again, it begins to pick up in hostility what it loses in humor. When the groups of people at which the joke is aimed also are the targets of actual (not merely verbal) forms of discrimination, then it becomes offensive...
Spiking the stale beer of Britons' discontent-deepening recession, wallet-walloping new taxes-came a tulip glass of bubbly named Di. When blond, blue-eyed, 19-year-old Lady Diana Spencer made her first formal appearance last week as the fiancée of the Prince of Wales, she left the island gasping. Attending a benefit recital at the Goldsmiths' Hall -close to St. Paul's Cathedral, where the royal couple will be married July 29-the Queen-to-be stepped out in a strapless, black silk-taffeta evening gown that radiated a wolf-whistle glamour...
Afghanistan. He gave no indication that Soviet troops would be withdrawn anytime soon. But he denied any Soviet designs on the Persian Gulf and proposed that the "military threat" to the region be removed by international agreement. U.S. policymakers were unimpressed. "It's a stale reiteration of their desire to get a finger in the Persian Gulf pie," said an intelligence analyst in Washington...