Word: staling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...would beg for food at restaurants and grocery stores," Kahrl says. "We told them what we were doing and said `Can you give us food?' It was something none of us had ever done before. They would give us food that was stale-dated, and one place in Utah gave us 70 pounds of vegetables and fruit...
...latest incredible news broke last week at the PTL ministry's forlorn theme park at Fort Mill, S.C., barely a tenth of the rooms were occupied in the Heritage Grand Hotel. Along the adjoining Main Street shopping arcade, stale popcorn was piled unsold in a vendor's cart, and saleswomen without customers knitted listlessly in a crafts shop. Cranes, brought in to construct Jim Bakker's fantasies, stood eerily idle, as they have since scandal struck 19 months...
...relies too heavily on stereotypes, especially in a bit about a high-powered, slimy executive of a type that is already familiar from Mamet and movies like Wall Street. In another somewhat ineffective monologue, Bogosian creates a Spinal Tap-like over-the-hill rocker, and the jokes seem stale and repetitive...
...quest for party harmony and the celebration of its attainment. Dukakis had been the adroit negotiator who had framed an unprecedented covenant of cooperation with Jesse Jackson. From his suite atop the Hyatt Regency, the Governor had proved in a way that was far more tangible than his stale talk about a Massachusetts miracle that he could handle tough problems and people. His prize was a choreographed convention, free of the furies that once plagued the party's psyche, but so denatured of passion that it could have passed for a Republican production...
Cheever would have groaned, or said something quite rude about such stale expressions. He was, after all, capable of describing himself as "intrinsically disheveled." Worse still, Donaldson seems only dimly aware of the discipline and artistry that went into Cheever's fiction. Two early stories, the biographer writes, "were deeply felt semiautobiographical tales populated by characters that the author (and hence the reader) clearly cared about." If "caring about" characters were truly a recipe for literary success, the world would be awash with masterpieces...