Word: stale
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...ideals of the Jamestown colony have grown unreal and stale like the values of Plymouth. The men who backed the Jamestown venture were no other-wordly visionaries, but practical men of business. The Virginia Company hankered after precious metals, a Northwest Passage, and raw materials with which to produce "all the commodities of Europe, Africa and Asia, and to supplye the wantes of all our decayed trades." Bradford's "spirite of God and his grace" were conceits foreign to the minds of these entrepreneurs. In return for their investment they wanted earthly dividends of the sort envisioned by Michael Drayton...
...Fall issue lacks a sense of life or relevancy which only vivid language can convey--strong verbs and taut imagery are prominently absent. The Advocate too often wallows in flat prose and free poetry, modes that were once, long ago, refreshing but are now, in less expert hands, stale and tired. In this issue, flat means not spare but listless, even flabby, and free means not spontaneous and natural but formless, thoughtless, and overly moody...
...Street. Meanwhile, two plainclothes members of the Washington morals squad, Privates Lamonte P. Drouillard and R. L. Graham, walked through the front door of the "Y" into the lobby, then descended to the basement men's room. A 9-ft. by 11-ft. spot reeking of disinfectant and stale cigars, the room is a notorious hangout for deviates. During one five-hour period earlier this year, police arrested eight homosexuals there, including two college professors and several Government workers...
...swallowed," he confesses in Spanish Harlem Incident. "Your cracked country lips I still wish to kiss," he says To Ramona. His songs (which he defines as "anything I can sing") are, as usual, loosely constructed, with occasional memorable melodic phrases and mostly forgettable verse that runs stale and sodden for miles and then suddenly takes one by surprise. As for his nasal voice and wheezing harmonica, his fanatic following is evidence that a taste for them can be acquired...
...Last year, supposing I could work nonstop as I once could, I devoted my whole holiday from the column to my book on the Greek Bronze Age. Consequently, I went back to my regular work about as stale as one of those pieces of 3,000-year-old bread that they sometimes find in Egyptian tombs. Then last spring I made an extremely taxing round-the-world reporting trip. After getting back from Saigon in mid-May, I was never really well, and this general misery crystallized into an interminable bout of summer flu and bronchitis that made this year...