In the forest, there are no horizons and so the dawn does not break but is instead born in the trees – a wan and smoky blue.
Long lace sleeves, tiny corsets, pooling trains and a mountain of crystals made for a rather wan, two-dimensional sort of glamour.
A rather wan Simon Cowell, certainly – but then, even Simon Cowell is just a rather wan Simon Cowell now.
Tobler, who killed herself in 1975, was the inspiration for the wan, wilted females in his paintings.
Those behind the museum are bullish about their achievement, not least curator Ingmarie Halling, who feels it casts the Victoria and Albert Museum's acclaimed David Bowie Is exhibition in a wan light: "I visited, but it wasn't exciting.
"They would say things like, 'that wan American smile'," says Dr Barry Gibson, a medical sociology lecturer at the University of Sheffield.
Wan with nerves, the chancellor of the exchequer was able to announce to Parliament the best economic figures in five years of faltering growth, falling living standards and painful spending cuts.
That has helped keep sovereign-bond yields low, despite a recent bout of volatility, which has encouraged investors to buy risky assets and allowed stockmarkets to shrug off weak economic data.American GDP fell in the first quarter, and early indications for the second quarter are wan: the Atlanta Fed's GDPNow model suggests annualised growth of just 1.1%.
One participant calls it "a pretty wan beast".
Mr Barak, even his perennial smile beginning to look wan, is reminding people that it was Mr Sharon's settlement-building on the West Bank, as a Likud minister during the 1970s and 1980s, which helped along the present violence.
Wan Muhammad Nor Matha, the interior minister, is himself a southern Muslim, and has promised to respect local sensibilities while tracking down the troublemakers.But in the long run, the unrest will not be solved by security measures alone.
