"tepid interest" is a valid sentence component in English.
It is used to describe feelings of apathy, aversion, or lack of enthusiasm. For example, your boss's tepid interest in the project made it difficult to get anyone invested in the task.
The Department of Homeland Security has greeted this private-sector initiative with only tepid interest.
A low vacancy rate in theaters and tepid interest among producers make that doubtful.
It's a place where there is more time to try new things, though often only tepid interest in doing so.
In defense of the linguists' tepid interest, there have until recently been few firm facts to go on.
TENNESSEE TITANS After offering Peyton Manning a lifetime contract, the owner Bud Adams betrays a tepid interest in Tebow by offering only a lifetime supply of Turtle Wax.
Four other new listings last week, including the movie distributor Bona Film Group and the mobile application provider Sky-mobi, made their debut to tepid interest from investors.
In the final days of the campaign, all four candidates were trolling for votes, striving to overcome low name recognition and tepid voter interest and seeking to harness (or deflect) voters' anger and frustration at Albany.
Their tepid electoral interest is directly reflected in young Americans' voting intentions.
But tepid political interest, tight budgets, and questions about the design's ability to produce a self-sustaining burn have put construction plans on ice until at least 2001 (Science, 6 December 1996, p. 1600).
That said, if the exit market remains tepid and interest rates rise, then later-stage and cross-over investors that supported the "private IPO" market will continue to be motivated to take their toys and go elsewhere.
Buyers' appetite for large acquisition and divestiture transactions has been tepid, but interest in natural gas assets has picked up among non-traditional buyers with "contrarian, long-term bullish" views on the commodity, analysts at Seaport Global Securities said in a recent note.
