How To Use Hackneyed In A Sentence
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But he insists on painting a picture with the same old hackneyed images and rancid cliches about salt-of-the-earth heartlanders and morally vacant or cowardly coastal cosmopolitans.
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It's a trite and hackneyed old platitude - but sometimes, you do just have to stop and look at what's around you.
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But the key to stock market glory isn't contained in some hackneyed phrase.
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Sketching the plot of the film calls to mind any number of archetypal/hackneyed tales of fraternal rivalry, flight from danger, coming of age, and so on.
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The mind tires with the second or third hackneyed phrase.
The Times Literary Supplement
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I'd agree that it is head-and-shoulders above most sitcoms but it follows hackneyed gender traditions (men are blokeish and committment-phobic; women are insecure and needy).
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By comparison, eighteenth-century painters are more hackneyed, whether producing ‘classical’ landscapes or topographical views.
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The action is hackneyed - the slo-mo martial arts stuff was neat the first time, but it was already getting old by the time it was re-used in The Matrix Reloaded.
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His speech seems to have no original ideas, furthermore it's full of hackneyed and stereotyped expressions.
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hackneyed phrases
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Power corrupts and absolute power absolutely corrupts. That's the old hackneyed phrase, but it's true.
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Both movies find fresh, unhackneyed historical footage.
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The plot of the film is just a hackneyed boy-meets-girl scenario.
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If only they had used biblical language at least it would have sounded less trite, hackneyed and cliched.
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History should be about forcing people to challenge their perceptions, not reinforcing hackneyed stereotypes of the past.
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That the "Phoebus" is hackneyed, and a school-boy image, is an accidental fault, dependent on the age in which the author wrote, and not deduced from the nature of the thing.
Biographia Literaria
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So you may find yourself glad when a hackneyed sketch about a snobbish country wife turns into tragedy.
Times, Sunday Times
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His argument that the media invariably and inaccurately portrays single women as pathetic is a little hackneyed.
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His first track sets the pace for the entire set, as he subtilizes the high drama of the famous c-sharp minor prelude which has become so hackneyed, often turned into a cartoon of itself owing to its own wide popularity.
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Secondly, it was full to overflowing of hackneyed sexist stereotypes.
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Or consider mankind's capacity for giving hackneyed phrases a graphic new twist.
Times, Sunday Times
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Efforts were made at home to procure for him the position of Secretary of Legation in London, which drew from him the remark, when they came to his knowledge, that he did not like to have his name hackneyed about among the office-seekers in Washington.
Washington Irving
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The initial combat scenes are well directed, chilling and very unsettling, but the events that follow, the courtroom sequences in particular, are hackneyed and dull.
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That is all well and good but constant repetition and even his most recherché songs become hackneyed.
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That I was inclined to look beyond the hackneyed was a clear signal sent out.
The Times of India
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Together they constitute an unhackneyed commentary on a creative force who contrived to remain both forbidding and inescapable.
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As for the hackneyed old argument that this is about oil, bah!
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Or consider mankind's capacity for giving hackneyed phrases a graphic new twist.
Times, Sunday Times
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In every case, Mozart was sharper, unhackneyed, and always threw in a little surprise.
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But a closer look reveals there's more to this course than a hackneyed phrase.
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The references to patriotic duty are predictable and hackneyed.
Times, Sunday Times
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The final hour has long past on the horror spoof and, sadly, all that's left is hackneyed jokes and trite dialogue.
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The program contains enough that is unhackneyed to satisfy more selective collectors.
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Morbid states of passion, the hectic bloom of fever, heady perfumes of the Orient and the tropics; the bitter-sweet blossom of love; forced fruits of the hot-house (_serres chaudes_); the iridescence of standing pools; the fungoidal growths of decay; such are some of the hackneyed metaphors which render the impression of this neo-romantic poetry.
A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century
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Their books use hackneyed plotlines, stock characters, and omission of inconvenient facts.
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`It was a dark and stormy night' is a hackneyed beginning for a story
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The initial combat scenes are well directed, chilling and very unsettling, but the events that follow, the courtroom sequences in particular, are hackneyed and dull.
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Bibliophile Stalker interviews Ellen Datlow, Editor of (among many, many other things) the upcoming anthology The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy: "It's not that the genres have weaknesses or strengths but that the purveyors of genres write well or badly and use the genres ambitiously or in hackneyed ways.
March 2008
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The most hackneyed device may seem brilliantly original to him, the stalest stage trick as fresh as if just hot from the brain; and jokes that deterred the dove from returning to the ark arride him vastly.
Without Prejudice
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Hackneyed and sterile, the Rockwell is ideal if you are looking for vastly overpriced drinks served by offhand waiters with pathetically slow service.
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It is a tribute to the quality of his unwavering line that neither has become half as hackneyed as it should have done.
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And ‘hackneyed cliché’ is itself a pleonasm.
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Or maybe we will criticize it for being boring or hackneyed.
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Anna Seward, for example, found Smith's dramatisation of her own life in her writing deeply improper and unfeminine, lampooning Smith for what she perceived as the improper washing of her dirty laundry in public and characterised her sonnets as 'everlasting lamentables [and] hackneyed scraps of dismality'. [
Charlotte (Turner) Smith (1749-1806)
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To make the play less hackneyed, the teenagers also impersonate a number of other characters, including a yardie pimp with whom both are involved, and sundry members of their own or another, hostile posse.
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Power corrupts and absolute power absolutely corrupts. That's the old hackneyed phrase, but it's true.
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I commented last week on hackneyed phrases in the election campaign.
Times, Sunday Times
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This along with others is listed under the headword "hackneyed phrases.
NPR Topics: News
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If only they had used biblical language at least it would have sounded less trite, hackneyed and cliched.
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His boss can take even a hackneyed phrase and let it dangle suggestively in the air until a dozen meanings reveal themselves.
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Gentlemen, conservation is a word that has wide application and meaning, but in the last five years it has become a hackneyed, much-abused term, glibly used by many who hunt and fish, few of whom have any idea what the word means or what it entails.
If You're Too Busy To Go FishingYou're Too Busy
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The lyrics that all the world loves and repeats, the poetry which is often called hackneyed, is on the whole the best poetry.
George Washington
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As it is today, this is pure sit-com material and most respectable sit-com writers would shy away from such clichéd and hackneyed situations.
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He asserted that a modern artist should be in tune with his times, careful to avoid hackneyed subjects.
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I judged it to be hackneyed although I could see it was incident-rich, with a roll-on narrative that reminded me of the way children play.
Critics reveal when they got it wrong
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While it might seem this could be just another drippy and hackneyed heart-of-the-West melodrama, this made-for-TV movie is actually quite engaging, mostly because of its wholesome approach.
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She didn't go in any hackneyed direction, but actually cohered as a real, powerful individual.
Greywalker
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The script is hackneyed, riddled with stereotypes and offers nothing that hasn't been seen in every single gangster film ever made.
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(I’m sorry if that comes across as hackneyed — because what you have recounted is definitely not.)
Her Bad Mother’s Home For Misfit Toys | Her Bad Mother
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In lesser hands, this film could've been hackneyed smarm.
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The action in the Bond films is tired, the jokes are unfunny and the scripts rarely more than a hackneyed series of conventions and foolish plot twists.
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It sounded kind of hackneyed and derivative to be honest. mangoshakes he's consistently funny. one of the funniest parts from cop trailer. and he didn't have to do something shocking to do it.
Seann William Scott to Star In Kevin Smith’s Hit Somebody | /Film
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We've heard Beethoven so many times that there is always a danger of it falling into a hackneyed mode of routine playing.
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The plot of the film is just a hackneyed boy-meets-girl scenario.
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They had no choice but to resort to amnesia and intermittent power impotency, which is always completely hackneyed and boring.
'Heroes' recap: A walk down memory lane | EW.com
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Mr. Harcourt and his outrigger were again skimming on the surface and floating about Rose; Mr. Greydon either had some excuse for calling on Arthur, or called without any excuse at all, except the old hackneyed one of "the fatality," and by his manner to Janet, Blanche was led to the comfortable conviction that, by giving Mr. Greydon this living, she should at once provide her village with an unexceptionable pastor, and pay off some of her debt of gratitude to the Hopkinson family.
The Semi-Detached House
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It is littered with hackneyed phrases and lazy commonplaces.
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It sounds a bit hackneyed but the best is seeing people grow and do things that are the result of your support or coaching.
Times, Sunday Times
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However, the story and the manner of its telling are alike hackneyed, dull, and pointless.
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That's one of those hackneyed sayings we grow accustomed to from a young age.
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As somebody who gets paid to sit in restaurants, I'm well accustomed to deciphering hackneyed old menu descriptions and cheffy verbiage.
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The result of all the investigations of this subject, appears to settle down into the hackneyed truism, that the passive verbs, and the moods and tenses, of some languages, are formed by inflections, or terminations either prefixed or postfixed, and of other languages, by the association of auxiliary verbs, which have not yet been contracted and made to coalesce as _terminations_.
English Grammar in Familiar Lectures
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His choral writing has a traditional yet unhackneyed eloquence that keeps bringing one back to what is being said.
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They are not hackneyed imitative replicas of the original versions.
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It's a trite and hackneyed old platitude - but sometimes, you do just have to stop and look at what's around you.
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They're hackneyed and thus utterly predictable, yet they still manage to be largely unintelligible.
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Their generic rock is the backing for observations about gender so hackneyed that the audience would demand a refund if a stand-up comic tried them.
Times, Sunday Times
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They also provide English with a number of now rather hackneyed phrases like ‘to cry wolf’.
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The term "crowd pleaser" is a real backhanded compliment in comedy, being associated with stale, hackneyed, button-pushing routines.
This week's new comedy
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The term "crowd pleaser" is a real backhanded compliment in comedy, being associated with stale, hackneyed, button-pushing routines.
This week's new comedy
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He makes well directed swipes at the hackneyed emotionalism that has crept into every newspaper, the cult of celebrity and, particularly, the decline of reporting of politics and serious discussion of policy.
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The distressing, and to my mind accurate, message that monopolies are putting profit before human and animal health and well being, is potent and distrubing, and would have been much better served without the emotional overkill, the taint of exaggeration; the helping of ham-fisted propaganda. (and okay, enough with the hackneyed food metaphors).
Food Inc. and the stench of ham-fisted exaggeration
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Maybe it's time to trot out that hackneyed phrase about ‘the pace of modern life’.
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And, of course, Nevin trots out that hackneyed myth of “the religious right” oppression as if any conservative or religious entity has or could stem the tide of the explosive growth of the porn industry, vile song lyrics, the sexualization of young girls by retailers and advertisers, teen pregnancy and drug use or any of the other rot in our culture.
Dinosaur tears « BuzzMachine
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Her illustrations are excellent and unhackneyed photographs.
The Times Literary Supplement
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Meanwhile the transitions and cross cutting formulations are hackneyed, usually singularised by low-angle zooms arranging the actors in Swimsuit Calendar poses.
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She reinforces this hackneyed portrait by evoking African tom-toms.
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I suggest a Sanctuary drinking game wherein every time Magnus makes a hackneyed historical or literary reference, you take five sips of fine 100 year old brandy from a large snifter.
Sanctuary Returns to SyFy for 3rd Season « Giant Killer Squid - Film, Comics, News, Reviews and more
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There are some fairly creepy set pieces but nothing really stands out, the acting is average, the plot is hackneyed and derivative, the direction is average.
Movie Review – The Unborn
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There is a hackneyed witticism about crofts being little pieces of land surrounded by regulations.
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Power corrupts and absolute power absolutely corrupts. That's the old hackneyed phrase, but it's true.
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My mind numbs in response to the parade of hackneyed phrases ( "And in conclusion, these books are both very similar and very different ...") when suddenly something catches my eye -- a turn of phrase or an extraliterary locution.
It's A Bird, It's A Plane, It's Plagiarism Buster
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It rose above the hackneyed, reproduced images of the diaspora.
The Crossing-Place
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Here I follow Lawrence Lipking's spirited and unhackneyed essay in resisting any clear or settled message.
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Perhaps it was no accident that the two events coincided, since the association between oysters and sex has been so hackneyed as to become an embarrassing cliché.
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This idea dates back so many thousands of years that it is more at risk of being hackneyed than revolutionary.
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The words she attributed to the marine is the tired, hackneyed Republican talking points she kept repeating ad nauseum during her campaign.
Think Progress » VIDEO: Schmidt’s Shame
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This year's summit has been accompanied by the usual round of hackneyed phrases about the need to end poverty.
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The blame, say critics, lies with the hackneyed, highly predictable plots.
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He often aphorized, "Frightfully hackneyed to say,
The Job An American Novel
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Hiding behind the hackneyed theme of a ruler being led astray by evil advisers, Becket could have been in no doubt that the scheme had been orchestrated by Henry.
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It sounds a bit hackneyed but the best is seeing people grow and do things that are the result of your support or coaching.
Times, Sunday Times
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It has a certain film music air to it and would make an unhackneyed filler for the next new collection of British orchestral marches.
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She does this not with hackneyed images of shell-shocked Tommies, but principally through simple visual metaphor.
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Here is music as beautiful, as intensely dramatic, as unhackneyed as the day it was written.
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If only they had used biblical language at least it would have sounded less trite, hackneyed and cliched.
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Audiences who had grown tired of hackneyed devices and betting on which token minority would die first had spoken with their wallets.
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Hackneyed, undisciplined and utterly rubbish, it ended with a shadowy stranger in black springing Myers from prison for no discernible reason.
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Still, the rarities, six pieces new to the concerts and an unhackneyed programme make the issue worthwhile.
Times, Sunday Times
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The nite also reiterated the hackneyed fact that music is not confined to one place.
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And for a writer praised for his verbal energy, he's not above succumbing to hackneyed images.
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It may be hackneyed to point out that people fought and died for the right to vote, but it's true all the same.
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It would be hackneyed if I say that death is something very sad and irreclaimable.
