"It was a little bit more cautious and a little bit more somber in terms of its tone," said Paul Ballew, a former Federal Reserve economist who is a senior vice president for Nationwide Insurance.
In Mr. McCain's speech last night to the Republican National Convention, the Arizona senator concentrated on the present, not the past, paying tribute to men and women in the armed services in these somber, heartfelt terms: "We may be good citizens, but make no mistake, they are the very best of us.
In his televised report to the nation Tuesday night, Mr. Kennedy did term the parley "somber".
One such area is collegiate or alternative rock, a loosely defined term that embraces noisy guitar bands, somber mope-rockers, dystopian speed-metal bands and the brute stomp of industrial rock.
But given the recent somber news of the Navy Yard shooting, the term "nothing else matters" is really in poor taste.
"That, in terms of his family history, is at best a somber reality.
Truman's reputation was saved not by his own actions but by the somber rebuttal of Gen. George Marshall, who informed Congress in no uncertain terms that MacArthur did not know what he was talking about.
But his theory also acknowledges the somber necessity of natural happenings, many of which seem in human terms so tragically unjust, as part of a vast system of checks and balances.
Totalitarianism cloaked as imperialism or colonialism - vague terms, that throughout history, have ended in the same somber graveyard of failed idealism.
On a more somber note, the discoveries raise questions about the species' long-term prospects as a free-ranging creature.
