Word: tenuous
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...sexist and tiresome. Worse yet are the strivings for novelistic originality. "Where were you when Kennedy was shot?" asks a character out of the blue. "Why?" queries Hackman. "Because it's one of those questions everyone knows the answer to." There's no real purpose to this dialogue (a tenuous connection to a murder later on is all), and it only seems to serve as a conceit: no great witticism, but maybe something no one's bothered to write down before, which seems to appeal to the writer's ego as it confuses the audience...
...sign of the pre-eminence of equal access as the issue of the year for administrators that it completely overshadowed merger this year, leaving unchanged the tenuous, complex Harvard-Radcliffe corporate relationship...
...wonderful," she says, but it's also a union tenuous enough to be held together only by the energy that Mallardi has put into her program and that the dancers have returned. Yet, as long as that energy can be sustained, it will probably keep on creating a fertile community of artists and a unique experience for the students who make the trek up to Radcliffe Yard...
Prufrocks in Reverse. Using ordinary language and sometimes vulgar mannerisms, the two Prufrocks reverse their accustomed stage personae to hint at tenuous meanings as complex as any in Eliot's poetry. Gielgud, a seedy intellectual in beer-stained pinstripes, conceals his natural grace and authority under nervous movements-hitching up his pants, ruffling his sandy-haired wig, filching cigarettes. He babbles an obbligato of literary cliches in an excessively ingratiating attempt to establish human contact. Richardson's stock character, the failed dreamer, prefers to stay pick led in his past: his arm now is to "drink with dignity...
...tempered whore; a sweet, naive Southern girl, who came to the North to find a slightly better life; the malevolent hustler; the rising young black attorney. They are all charming characters, given to relaxed and easy banter that flows rapidly and naturally, but they all perch precariously on a tenuous line between reality and sit-com land...