Word: trite
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...first act and replaces Whedon as Clyde for a ballet scene in the second. Norriss has obvious talents but they gain nothing from his fixed smile--an Amateur Hour expression and indeed the only amateurish thing about Norriss. The ballet, choreographer Dolly Niggemeyer's only misstep, is a trite, dull loss for which the dancers cannot be held responsible. Otherwise, the dancing is attractive and the stage is always lively, seldom cluttered...
...Dick Clasby, injured in last year's Davidson game, might have made the difference in the Princeton game. But even though Clasby had a medical release, Jordan refused to use him, barking "I don't know when he'll be back" at the press. As a coach, he sets trite but essential examples of fitness for his team. He neither drinks nor smokes, but nibbles candy bars and drinks coke instead. And although he demands "100 percent effort" on the field, he does not police his training rules. He admits "I don't expect any great rah-rah spirit here...
...Connor's prose is most interesting. Sometimes it seems to hover between a clinched thought and a profundity, and then lights invariably on the latter's side. There are many trite lines in his exposition, but he uses them to advantage, and they seem to enhance rather than detract from a description. It is unwise to think that he is consciously striving for an idiom, because his range of character cannot be so confined. Perhaps the best that can be said of this prose is that it is intriguing. It is also wonderfully readable...
...machines are powered by mankind and subject to the tragedies of blood, the triumphs, agonies and ironies of history. Toynbee's knowledge of the machinery is unmatched-the cities, armies, ruling classes, police forces, bureaucracies, churches, cliques. In his hands, civilizations become curiously human, not merely in the trite sense that they seem young or old, fresh or tired, but in that they seem to parallel human psychology; they try to evade death, fool themselves about their fate, are egocentric or lovelorn or fear-haunted or resigned...
...issue contains a brace of sketches by Sean Sweeney (one of them quite effective), and three poems (one Eliot, one Yeats, one new American). The deft Mr. Kimball, who was obviously in charge of the issue, has a last-minute space-filler which isn't half so trite as it would have been in lesser hands...