Word: tritely
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
...Huston (who first directed him in 1941 as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, and with whom he has made Treasure of Sierra Madre, African Queen and, lately, Beat the Devil) he gambled both professional reputation and money on his conviction that motion pictures should break away from the trite and the ordinary. Last year he abandoned the security of a 15-year contract (it had eight more years to run) and left Warner to strike...
...advertising boasts "The original New York cast"-cunningly masking the players' well-deserved obscurity by mentioning no names. Authors-or, more accurately, collectors-Salisbury Field and Margaret Mayo-have created an amalgam of petty and trite attacks on the seventh Commandment interlarded with witless and fatigued dialogue. It takes a whole act to establish the fact that a chubby blonde is overly matey with the males in her apartment house and that her husband doesn't particularly like it. In fact, he insists on moving to another apartment. But the long arm of concidence reaches about corners to chuckle...