Word: tedium
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Enjoying It Less. Perhaps the most damaging case against pornography is stated by Fanny herself: its greatest offense is tedium. She begins her second letter saying: "I imagined, indeed, that you would have been cloy'd and tired with the uniformity of adventures and expressions, inseparable from a subject of this sort, whose bottom, or groundwork being, in the nature of things, eternally one and the same...
...hard to tell whether the utter tedium of George Nugent's String Quartet, Gerald Bennett's Three Songs, and James Webster's String Quartet should be blamed on the performers or the composers. In all three works, it is clear that the composers have approached the common idiom of twentieth century music--and beneath a few musical pinnacles, there really is one--much as a snake eats a rat: by swallowing it whole and unchewed. Giving the details of the ingestion would be too painful here. Three Psalm Fragments, by Thomas Benjamin, received a spirited performance by a selected chorus...
Littlejohn rambles on in this vein for ten tedious pages. The reader, however, can conquer the tedium by letting his mind wander and try to guess whose style Littlejohn is trying to imitate...
...other hand, absence of a time limit often produces incredibly long, dull ball games that usually end with only a few diehards still in the stands. In the last few years the public has been rebelling against the tedium that marks most baseball games. Changing the rule might help--I hope it does--but baseball might well be doomed to a gradual decline in popularity if recently shifts in public attitudes continue...
Almost to the point of tedium Dr. Barnett warned of the demise of state power. He told us that "the preservation of the prerogatives of people of a sovereign state, their right to deal exclusively with domestic problems and the absolute and unqualified denial of a totalitarian state in the United States--these principles are just as vital as, and more intimately affect, the welfare of every man, woman and child in America than even such important questions as foreign policy ..." There is, of course, no meaning in this grandiose concoction of words. But whatever message the great orator might...