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mediocre
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  • The BBC had run a preliminary story yesterday to mediocre response.†   (source)
  • Then in the everyday, mediocre tone he used when he was proposing something really outrageous, he added, "Let's go to the beach.†   (source)
  • After a humiliating wait while the brainiacs were tussled over by the best EduCompounds and the transcripts of the mediocre were fingered and skimmed and had coffee spilled on them and got dropped on the floor by mistake, Jimmy was knocked down at last to the Martha Graham Academy; and even that only after a long spell of lacklustre bidding.†   (source)
  • It was supposed to be a game between the two best teams in the state, but Rogers seemed mediocre.†   (source)
  • The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her.†   (source)
  • Really mediocre player, I don't mean to be snotty but she could hardly keep up with the section when we were kids and she's in the Cleveland Philharmonic now and it upsets me more than I would admit to just anyone.†   (source)
  • My first impression of Beck had not been favorable: a back slapping Dallas pathologist with less-than-mediocre mountaineerring skills, at first blush he came across as a rich Republican blowhard looking to buy the summit of Everest for his trophy case.†   (source)
  • We brought our schoolbooks with us and study them whenever Mother threatens we're going to fall behind and wear the dunce cap when we go home, which there's no chance of really, except for Rachel, who is the one stubbornly mediocre mentality in our family.†   (source)
  • What began as a comic-serious homage to the ghost of John Keats became my last reason for existence, an epic tour de force in an age of mediocre farce.†   (source)
  • Bill Walsh had shown how much an imaginative coach might achieve even with mediocre talent; Noel Mazzone was demonstrating how little could be achieved by a coach who did not admit any role for the imagination.†   (source)
  • So, although the carnival was a lot less than mediocre (which is why it agreed to a Colored Thursday), it gave the four hundred black people in its audience thrill upon thrill upon thrill.†   (source)
  • We'll do your idea, then," Kim said, and when we got a B minus, she seemed to gloat about our mediocre grade.†   (source)
  • They're not particularly valuable, mostly of mediocre quality, nothing out of the ordinary.†   (source)
  • Estha finished school with mediocre results, but refused to go to college.†   (source)
  • And one has a right, perhaps, to feel a satisfaction those content to serve mediocre employers will never know - the satisfaction of being able to say with some reason that one's efforts, in however modest a way, comprise a contribution to the course of history.†   (source)
  • I felt like a third-tier speaker at a mediocre convention, me in my business-casual blues, addressing a captive audience of jet-lagged people daydreaming about what they'd eat for lunch.†   (source)
  • Schenley's in warm-painted colors goes on forever, but one gets the feeling that Irma's gives tired, mediocre permanents because of the way the paint is cracking on her sign.†   (source)
  • Seven doctors worked at the complex, not all of them fully competent—the staff was entirely Haitian, and Haitian medical training is mediocre at best.†   (source)
  • Because Maycomb's church had for years not been large enough for a good minister but too big for a mediocre one, Maycomb was delighted when, at the last Church Conference, the authorities decided to send its Methodists an energetic young one.†   (source)
  • During the four years she had worked for him she had never once fumbled a job or turned in a single mediocre report.†   (source)
  • Like her father, she was most passionate about modern art, a movement given birth to by painters like Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Gauguin, and she was quick to discern the influence of these painters in even the mediocre work we examined.†   (source)
  • It was a town like some towns in the American South, frozen in its history as Lot's wife was trapped in salt, and doomed, therefore, as its history, that overwhelming, omnipresent gift of God, could not be questioned, to be the property of the gray, unquestioning mediocre.†   (source)
  • We played one game without Cal and lost to a mediocre team from Staten Island that we should have beaten easily.†   (source)
  • I participated in sports and games as often as I could, but my performances were no more than mediocre.†   (source)
  • One demon conquered, I slipped on flip-flops, mediocre protection against monster cockroaches, wandered toward the kitchen.†   (source)
  • The problem was, he was no more than a mediocre riddler and had never placed very high in Carvahall's annual riddle contest.†   (source)
  • My grades had always been mediocre, and given that I had never finished eleventh grade, the private schools in San Juan wouldn't accept me as a senior.†   (source)
  • The remainder were divided between the supposedly excellent teachers (high scores but no suspicious answer patterns) and, as a further control, classrooms with mediocre scores and no suspicious answers.†   (source)
  • Have you ever wondered why so many mediocre people find their way into positions of authority in companies and organizations?†   (source)
  • "We would have been mediocre that season if we hadn't rallied the way we did," says Richard.†   (source)
  • Two inept translators, a man and a woman, provided mediocre translation over a pair ofmicrophones, but they often forgot to translate and we, the frustrated audience, were left to guess for ourselves most of the time.†   (source)
  • The entire populace knows thousands of songs, and there is hardly a mediocre voice among them.†   (source)
  • It was bad enough that the potboy from Avalon acted as if John were a knight and not just a mediocre scholar from Oxford, but Jack couldn't understand why Aven seemed to forgive and forget so quickly.†   (source)
  • It was a mediocre boardinghouse for penniless students, presided over by a middle-aged couple with a calling for espionage.†   (source)
  • Major Major had been born too late and too mediocre.†   (source)
  • She intended to drown her mood in cheap liquor and mediocre music at Mavis's latest gig at the Blue Squirrel.†   (source)
  • When Arthur Lee wrote to tell John Adams that Jefferson's supposed genius was in fact mediocre, his affectation great, his vanity greater, and warned Adams to judge carefully how much he confided in Jefferson, Adams would have none of it, replying, "My new partner is an old friend …. whose character I studied nine or ten years ago, and which I do not perceive to be altered…… I am very happy with him.†   (source)
  • Are we to lower our standards and applaud a student's mediocre efforts because it's simply less mediocre than his or her peers?†   (source)
  • If I'd tried to do both, I'd have been no more than mediocre.†   (source)
  • He became a second lieutenant in the Corps, an unspectacular rank, and was a fair student and a game but mediocre intramural athlete.†   (source)
  • They said her constant weariness and tears were from her concern over my mediocre studies.†   (source)
  • "And how about this other?" she asked, and waved her hand toward the body of the ship where it had, "Alfred Tennyson Burns, a good husband and a good father, a good provider and a reasonable Christian, a mediocre singer, a good man with a love for nature and literature and an excellent mathematician who never did a damn thing with it--Born to Curtis Junior Burns and Mary Ray Burns in the town of Clayboro, county of Thompson, state of South Carolina on January 4, 1917, and went with…†   (source)
  • For within these confessions it will be discovered that we really have no acquaintance with true evil; the evil portrayed in most novels and plays and movies is mediocre if not spurious, a shoddy concoction generally made up of violence, fantasy, neurotic terror and melodrama.†   (source)
  • Clinging to the sides of the dreamlike waterways was the litter of our times, the motels, the hot-dog stands, the merchants of the cheap and mediocre and tawdry so loved by summer tourists, but these incrustations were closed and boarded against the winter and, even open, I doubt that they could dispel the enchantment of the Wisconsin Dells.†   (source)
  • Tom recovered and finished the ride clean, but as he walked back to the chutes he knew it was a mediocre ride.†   (source)
  • If he was lucky he might get away without paying Will Hodge a red cent--and old Paxton would rather pay blood than money: his mediocre fortune was his love and his chilly god--but win or lose he would pay through the nose for the battle.†   (source)
  • It's, only in mediocre books that people are divided into two camps and have nothing to do with each other.†   (source)
  • Trying to appear mediocre in front of the other tributes is the last bit of strategy I remember.   (source)
  • I went to bed expecting to wake up the next morning, give my mediocre presentation, and call it a day.   (source)
  • Despite Haymitch's order to appear mediocre, Peeta excels in hand-to-hand combat, and I sweep the edible plants test without blinking an eye.   (source)
  • When I came home from boot camp with my fifteen-hundred-dollar earnings deposited in a mediocre regional bank, a senior enlisted marine drove me to Navy Federal—a respected credit union—and had me open an account.   (source)
  • Professors and classmates seemed genuinely interested in what seemed to me a superficially boring story: I went to a mediocre public high school, my parents didn't go to college, and I grew up in Ohio.   (source)
  • Ironically, this same code had been a plot twist in a mediocre thriller Langdon had read years ago.†   (source)
  • Both my hammock and my attempt to connect with them are mediocre at best.†   (source)
  • We won the game 32-12, our fifth straight win—but my third straight mediocre game.†   (source)
  • When she finished school, she won admission into a mediocre college of architecture in Delhi.†   (source)
  • I've had it up to here with backward, corrupt, mediocre fools."†   (source)
  • That was not her thing—she regarded herself as a mediocre writer.†   (source)
  • But that's the way things go when you elevate mediocre people to positions of authority.'†   (source)
  • I figured that would speak louder than my mediocre transcripts from Sunrise High School.†   (source)
  • Not disgraceful, mind you, just mediocre.†   (source)
  • VMI had found heroes in three mediocre players, and it was beautiful to watch.†   (source)
  • The work is mediocre, though quite workmanlike.†   (source)
  • But it's nice for a mediocre man to know that greatness must be the loneliest state in the world.†   (source)
  • Yet you confide much more in a boy who is incapable of Occlumency, whose magic is mediocre, and who has a direct connection into the Dark Lord's mind!†   (source)
  • He is mediocre to the last degree, though as obnoxious and self-satisfied as was his father before him.†   (source)
  • Please do not misunderstand me here; I do not refer to the mindless sort of 'loyalty' that mediocre employers bemoan the lack of when they find themselves unable to retain the services of high-calibre professionals.†   (source)
  • How could the technical staff here be so mediocre that she, who had not majored in engineering and who had no real working experience, easily took over their jobs?†   (source)
  • I already pictured this sweet and mediocre girl saying something uninteresting like Oh, n00000, oh my God, and I already knew part of me would be looking at her and thinking: You've never murdered for me.†   (source)
  • He could not for the life of him understand why so many influential financial reporters treated mediocre financial whelps like rock stars.†   (source)
  • "— mediocre, arrogant as his father, a determined rule-breaker, delighted to find himself famous, attention-seeking and impertinent — " "You see what you expect to see, Severus," said Dumbledore, without raising his eyes from a copy of Transfiguration Today.†   (source)
  • When she was fourteen or fifteen I was convinced that she was the one—and not her brother or any of the mediocre cousins, nephews, and nieces around me—who was destined to run the Vanger business one day, or at least play a central role in it.†   (source)
  • It is of course noticeable that the individuals who express such scepticism invariably turn out to be the most mediocre of our profession - those who know they lack the ability to progress to any position of note and who aspire only to drag as many down to their own level as possible - and one is hardly tempted to take such opinions seriously.†   (source)
  • I plunged into the dark daydream I'd indulged over the past few years when Amy had made me feel my smallest: I daydreamed of hitting her with a hammer, smashing her head in until she stopped talking, finally, stopped with the words she suctioned to me: average, boring, mediocre, unsurprising, unsatisfying, unimpressive.†   (source)
  • The only problem was that Bjurman was such a mediocre lawyer that he was hardly capable of exploiting his opportunities.†   (source)
  • It makes you feel forever mediocre.†   (source)
  • And still a mediocre ride.†   (source)
  • Everything is set up, though, the rented thick-stemmed wineglasses, the bottles of mediocre hooch, the mineral water for teetotalers, because who would serve unadulterated chlorine from the tap?†   (source)
  • The crank is definitely mediocre, but it does the job if you do enough, keep going back-and back-for more.†   (source)
  • Transito Soto conducted me to a room that was nondescript but clean; its only sign of extravagance was a series of frescoes that were poor copies of the ones at Pompeii, which some mediocre painter had reproduced on the walls, and a large, slightly rusty antique bathtub with running water.†   (source)
  • His grades were mediocre: biology, C; chemistry, D; college algebra, C; sociology, B. In a family where Cs were unacceptable, Adam was slipping.†   (source)
  • Mediocre.†   (source)
  • I chose not to be mediocre.†   (source)
  • Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.†   (source)
  • McLean's bucking for rank," Braselton said, in the only amusing aside of his mediocre and emulative life.†   (source)
  • Early on, I had discovered that I would rather take "Principles of Business Management" taught by an excellent teacher than suffer through "Shakespeare's Tragedies," a subject I normally would have enjoyed, with a mediocre one.†   (source)
  • They were just predictably mediocre.†   (source)
  • We also talked about mediocre publicists who have nothing to say to life and the world as a whole, of petty second-raters who are only too happy when some nation, preferably a small and wretched one, is constantly discussed-this gives them a chance to show off their competence and cleverness, and to thrive on their compassion for the persecuted.†   (source)
  • A triumph of the mediocres which is sweet to the majority.†   (source)
  • He knows himself to be mediocre, but he's great in the eyes of others.†   (source)
  • Names scattered in a gossip column, authors, artists, actors, and their kind, even the mediocre ones, as long as she had learnt of them in print.†   (source)
  • It means a mediocre hitter in baseball.†   (source)
  • I knew him—a mediocre fellow"; occasionally some remote comment: "Czechs make good coachmen; nothing else"; but his mind was far from world affairs; it was there, on the spot, turned in on himself; he had no strength for any other war than his own solitary struggle to keep alive.†   (source)
  • In the winter a few chill boarders, those faces, those personalities which become mediocre through repetition, sat for hours before the coals of the parlor hearth, rocking interminably, dull of voice and gesture, as hideously bored with themselves and Dixieland, no doubt, as he with them.†   (source)
  • It was as though she who had arranged this room had said: "This I will have, and this, and this,' taking piece by piece from the treasures in Manderley each object that pleased her best, ignoring the second-rate, the mediocre, laying her hand with sure certain instinct only upon the best.†   (source)
  • This evening she is merely a commonplace, mediocre actress.†   (source)
  • Mrs. Otter, meek, mediocre, and self-sat isfied, wore an air of importance.†   (source)
  • Miss Gertrude Farish, in fact, typified the mediocre and the ineffectual.†   (source)
  • I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.†   (source)
  • But what is mediocre and makeshift will never be.†   (source)
  • I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry."†   (source)
  • You will never be anything but mediocre.'†   (source)
  • Assuredly, Didymus of Alexandria is no mediocre philosopher.†   (source)
  • His digestion was mediocre, and he had been attacked by a watering in one eye.†   (source)
  • To say "the skilful" amounts to saying "the mediocre."†   (source)
  • The fist is no mediocre element of respect.†   (source)
  • This mediocre play upon words produced the effect of a stone in a pool.†   (source)
  • As for Eponine, Javert had caused her to be seized; a mediocre consolation.†   (source)
  • Her husband's quiet tastes irritate her, I think, and she finds it worth while to play the patroness to a group of young poets and painters of advanced ideas and mediocre ability.†   (source)
  • He believes in his heart that the marriage would make AMORY mediocre and ROSALIND miserable, but he feels a great sympathy for both of them.†   (source)
  • Mrs. Kearney said nothing, but, as the mediocre items followed one another on the platform and the few people in the hall grew fewer and fewer, she began to regret that she had put herself to any expense for such a concert.†   (source)
  • But perhaps that is why we do not call him mediocre—precisely because he felt that in some way or other such an unequivocal reason was lacking.†   (source)
  • In normal, mediocre trials its officials have contact with the public, and they're very well equipped for it, but here they don't; normal trials run their course all by themselves, almost, and just need a nudge here and there; but when they're faced with cases that are especially difficult they're as lost as they often are with ones that are very simple; they're forced to spend all their time, day and night, with their laws, and so they don't have the right feel for human…†   (source)
  • On Gottlieb's birthday he gave him a shocking smoking-jacket of cherry and mauve velvet, and when he called at Gottlieb's flat, which was often, Gottlieb had to put on the ghastly thing and sit humming while Sondelius assaulted him with roaring condemnations of mediocre soup and mediocre musicians…… That Sondelius gave up surprisingly decorative dinner-parties for these calls, Gottlieb never knew.†   (source)
  • But her method, an echo of her charming touch, came to life now and then in the fingers of her pupils, even of those who had been in other respects quite mediocre, had given up music, and hardly ever opened a piano.†   (source)
  • You see, in other things, if you're a doctor or if you're in business, it doesn't matter so much if you're mediocre.†   (source)
  • The mediocre intellects, Plato's second class, use the remnants of romantic chivalry diluted with Victorian sentiment—and we who consider ourselves the intellectuals cover it up by pretending that it's another side of us, has nothing to do with our shining brains; we pretend that the fact that we realize it is really absolving us from being a prey to it.†   (source)
  • Neither the former nor the latter was the case with Hans Castorp, and so he probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.†   (source)
  • …always when he knew that they were to meet, he formed a picture of her in his mind; and the necessity, if he was to find any beauty in her face, of fixing his eyes on the fresh and rosy protuberance of her cheekbones, and of shutting out all the rest of those cheeks which were so often languorous and sallow, except when they were punctuated with little fiery spots, plunged him in acute depression, as proving that one's ideal is always unattainable, and one's actual happiness mediocre.†   (source)
  • It was solely because he shared the all too charitable biases of his age, he said, that the great Dante had taken that mediocre scribbler seriously and had assigned him such an important role in his own epic, a role to which Herr Lodovico probably assigned far too much Masonic significance.†   (source)
  • There was not in it the smallest approach even to the mediocre achievement at which most of the young persons were able after some months to arrive.†   (source)
  • …from the pleasures which are offered to them above and below that point, that degree in life in which they will remain fixed until the day of their death, and are content, in the end, to describe as pleasures, for want of any better, those mediocre distractions, that just not intolerable tedium which is enclosed there with them; Swann would endeavour not to find charm and beauty in the women with whom he must pass time, but to pass his time among women whom he had already found to be…†   (source)
  • Hans Castorp was neither a genius nor an idiot, and if we refrain from applying the word "mediocre" to him, we do so for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with his intelligence and little or nothing to do with his prosaic personality, but rather out of deference to his fate, to which we are inclined to attribute a more general significance.†   (source)
  • Danglars comprehended the full extent of the wretched fate that overwhelmed Dantes; and, when Napoleon returned to France, he, after the manner of mediocre minds, termed the coincidence, "a decree of Providence."†   (source)
  • General Jackson, whom the Americans have twice elected to the head of their Government, is a man of a violent temper and mediocre talents; no one circumstance in the whole course of his career ever proved that he is qualified to govern a free people, and indeed the majority of the enlightened classes of the Union has always been opposed to him.†   (source)
  • There is not a mediocre scribbler who does not try his hand at discovering truths applicable to a great kingdom, and who is very ill pleased with himself if he does not succeed in compressing the human race into the compass of an article.†   (source)
  • Emma was secretly pleased that she had reached at a first attempt the rare ideal of pale lives, never attained by mediocre hearts.†   (source)
  • I am doatingly fond of music—passionately fond;—and my friends say I am not entirely devoid of taste; but as to any thing else, upon my honour my performance is mediocre to the last degree.†   (source)
  • It is true, between ourselves, that M. de Morcerf is one of the most assiduous peers at the Luxembourg, a general renowned for theory, but a most mediocre amateur of art.†   (source)
  • Here Phoebus, whose imagination was endowed with but mediocre power of creation, began to find himself in a quandary as to a means of extricating himself for his prowess.†   (source)
  • The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of sultanas; every notary bears within him the debris of a poet.†   (source)
  • Because lips libertine and venal had murmured such words to him, he believed but little in the candour of hers; exaggerated speeches hiding mediocre affections must be discounted; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest metaphors, since no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sorrows; and since human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move…†   (source)
  • They had obtained a mediocre consolation at best,—permission to be interred at a special hour and in a special corner in the ancient Vaugirard cemetery, which was made of land which had formerly belonged to their community.†   (source)
  • I have kind of a rat face, and my mediocre vision makes me squint a lot.†   (source)
  • She probably didn't notice the mediocre lighting and frequent shadow problems, for example.†   (source)
  • Now I know a mediocre amount, which frankly is much more than I am actually interested in knowing.†   (source)
  • Given the worse-than-mediocre state of my abilities in the latter direction, I had decided to borrow a book from Colum's library.†   (source)
  • Then it was the end of visiting hours, and a nurse came in and told me I had to go, and if we're being honest, I sort of regretted that, just because I felt like I had done a mediocre job of cheering Rachel up and wanted to keep going for a bit.†   (source)
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