Word: shopworn
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...recurrent moral tale pitting good against evil that is guaranteed to generate tears, confirm stereotypes and, most important, get readers to turn the page. Such allegories are generally passed off as a search for deeper meaning or an attempt to humanize the injured party. Yet the images are so shopworn and predictable that they in fact dehumanize. And the ostensible larger meaning is patently obvious: here lies another life that could have contributed much to society had it not been crushed by those who deserved to die instead...
FAIRPORT CONVENTION: RED & GOLD (Rough Trade). When this British group started up in the late '60s, their music was called "folk rock." Two decades on, the phrase is shopworn, but the band's music -- graced by some ghosts of ancient traditional melody -- is as splendid and mysterious as ever...
...most potent writing to be found in any mystery of recent months appears in Jonathan Valin's Extenuating Circumstances (Delacorte; 234 pages; $15.95). His detective, Harry Stoner, yet another of the shopworn ex-cops so beloved of the genre, is hired to investigate the disappearance of a wealthy politician and do-gooder. The missing man is found tortured to death. His killers: two boy prostitutes, one of whom was seeking a father figure, the other of whom scorned his client as a masochistic "beat freak." The who in this whodunit is known early in the story. Valin is more interested...
...acquire couth and literacy, but cute faces and cunning timing do not add up to a believable person. As the crusading journalist who sets out to trap Brock and woo away his woman, Daniel Hugh Kelly (Hardcastle and McCormick) seems lobotomized. Only Franklin Cover (The Jeffersons), as a sozzled, shopworn and sardonic Washington fixer, evokes a credible human being...
...question about what punishment would be appropriate if abortions, as he urged, were made illegal, Dukakis immediately jumped on the issue to declare, "I think that what the Vice President is saying is that he is prepared to brand a woman a criminal for making this decision." The now shopworn controversies over the Pledge of Allegiance and Dukakis' membership in the American Civil Liberties Union also made their obligatory appearances as Bush charged that his opponent is "out of the mainstream. . . Do we want this country to go that far left...