"Failed to make progress," "regressive steps," "little improvement," "severe suppression," "steps backward" — bleak phrases like these stand out in their submissions, which have been collected online.
The words are bleak, but his phrasing lends them majesty.
He knows she's received them when she writes a song using one of his phrases, "Bleaker and Obliquer".
Buzz Aldrin, for instance, described the lunar landscape as a vision of "magnificent desolation," a grand phrase for a bleak truth.
Even on the rare occasions when they turn a pretty phrase or conjure a bleak insight into the loneliness or hardship of life, their feet are always on the ground.
But there was more pleasure than bitterness in the music, if only the pleasures of clarity and distillation: of finding the turns of phrase, melody and dynamics that made some bleak insight linger.
But the leaders of Burundi's military government prefer to call the strikingly bleak places pictured in these pages "regroupment" camps, a phrase that makes them sound almost sensible.
"Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" creaks and glistens in the bleak midwinter of that epoch, throughout which, to borrow a beautiful phrase from Coleridge that sums up le Carré's achievement, "the Frost performs its secret ministry".
The title phrase had been used earlier by Tennyson in this bleak sense in Maud: "Long dead!
Trembling strings repeat the introductory phrase, and then a chasm of spooky harmony opens: loud, bleak A-minor chords in the winds and strings alternate with ominous brass sonorities of C minor, E-flat minor, and F-sharp minor.
