Word: staling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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guitar, And even in the instant when the snow grew stale, when the thaw came...
...potential maximum of four; instead, it got a boldface Poor. Sheraton rapped the place for every sin from pretentious décor to "lackadaisical and inept" service. The fish and lobster were "hopelessly overcooked." The egg roll "oozed grease." The spareribs were "dreadful," the dim sum were "stale," the sesame beef roll "stiff and cold." As for the chrysanthemum tea, it "could easily have been matched with water in which artichokes had been cooked." Ow! as they might say in Canton...
...furniture of the American myths is being dismantled and stored. Psychologically, if not yet financially, a stale air of foreclosure has wafted around. It is not that the U.S. is broke or now bereft of such resources as its grain, its amazing capacity to nourish life. But Americans have always needed to know the point of it all; that has been part of their peculiar national "innocence" and residual Puritan sense of themselves as the new elect of God. Without such grace or rationale, without the comfort of their demonstrable virtue and uniqueness, Americans feel themselves sliding toward triviality...
...proved to be a highly effective weapon: relatively cheap, easy to mass produce, reliable and deadly even in inexperienced hands. A case in point was Marilyn French's first novel, The Women's Room (1977). It hit middle-class America at the right time. Consciousness was up; stale marriages were crumbling like mummies exposed to the air; Jacks were breaking their crowns and Jills stopped tumbling after. The Women's Room certainly contributed to the body count. Its views were stated with unnerving energy and conviction; the prose was tight; the suburban settings had the authentic odor...
Paradoxically, much of the dialogue works. French has a knack for orchestrating voices. Even they grow stale, how ever, as the conversations between Victor and Dolores come to follow a predictable cycle: Scotch drinking, lovemaking, remembrances of painful pasts and talk that adds up to a feminist equivalent of Soviet socialist realism. Yet The Bleeding Heart is not just a popular novel for the female market. Attentive male readers will discover why so many wom en are now saying "Yes, yes" when there's "No, no" in their eyes...