The marination also added subtle overtones of herby, spicy flavor to a bird that, let's face it, can taste bland as blancmange.
–Julia Moskin Smithsonian: Mimi Sheraton offers a tasting tour of 13 salts from around the world, from Bolivia and the Himalayas to Sicily and Utah: "The salts differ in crystal forms and subtle overtones of minerals, bitterness, saltiness and sharpness".
And what exactly is "sexual content?" According to the PTC, it includes dancing, nudity (partial, obscured or implied) and "scenes in which sexualization was intentionally ambiguous and communicated using subtle overtones and social cues" including scenes that "required knowledge of a previous storyline or history and/or knowledge of the characters' general disposition".
In the case of the young Negro artist Locke claims "[r]ace for them is but an idiom of experience, a sort of added enriching adventure and discipline, giving subtler overtones to life, making it more beautiful and interesting, even if more poignantly so.
Nevertheless, some audiophiles maintain that the best phonograph recordings stamped on polyvinyl chloride (or "vinyl") discs deliver subtle musical overtones that are almost invariably lost in the digitization process.
Whatever people's criticisms of the film's familiar-seeming plot or its sledgehammer-subtle political overtones, most agreed that it was a magnificent spectacle.
This line is especially hard to take since it was the Republicans who perfected the art of injecting racial fears into modern-day politics (remember Willie Horton in 1988?) and have conducted an unrelenting personal attack on President Obama that sometimes has not-so-subtle racial overtones.
With a few sniffs and a couple of swishes of the tongue, a wine connoisseur can distinguish the gentle floral notes of a Nuits-St.-Georges, say, from the subtle berry and chocolate overtones of a Charmes-Chambertin.
Good-quality pearls are often prized for their overtones — the subtle color that is visible on their outer surface when light hits them.
The sounding of the bass note produces more subtle sonic structures in its overtones; similarly, inanimate nature produces animate life.
Enter willingly, and a secret world of continual, subtle shifts, discreet pulsations and shimmering overtones emerges.
