The lusterless engines that had been dropped in on Toyota's assembly line many years ago were retired in favor of more power, better mileage and improved emissions.
It is also an enigma, a powerful state wary of power, a lusterless leader.
ONE bright spot in the lusterless recovery that started in 2009 has been the performance of the private sector.
Today's lusterless brass would never declare, as Sherman did, "I can make this march, and make Georgia howl!" or say of a superior, as Sherman did of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, "He stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk".
Now the Nets (28-14) toaveLos Angelesgeles to meet the lusterless but defending champion Lakers on Friday night.
Though the novel is set in West Egg on a different shore of Long Island, Fitzgerald might as well have been describing the Hamptons in July and August -- "a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lusterless moon".
On a recent afternoon Mr. Jacobs lay in a hospital bed staring blankly at the ceiling, his eyes sunk in his skull, his skin lusterless.
He is rolled into a nursing home, half his face paralyzed into a frown and his eyes -- once sparkling blue, now lusterless -- dead above those famous concave cheeks.
England and Nigeria played to a scoreless tie on a blistering afternoon today in a game that proved lusterless but gave England the point it needed to reach the second round of the World Cup.
For at least the first half of the past year, it looked as if 2002 was going to be a long, lusterless chain of tepid pleasures and cold disappointments for New York theatergoers.
I write to give my life a form, a narrative, a chronology; and, for good measure, I seal loose ends with cadenced prose and add glitter where I know things were quite lusterless.
