Literary notes about STODGY (AI summary)
Writers employ "stodgy" to evoke a sense of dullness, heaviness, or unyielding conventionality in both tangible and abstract contexts. It can describe the oppressive weight of a landscape or food that is unappetizingly dense ([1], [2]), while also characterizing individuals or societies as rigid and overly traditional ([3], [4]). The word sometimes criticizes the lack of innovation in art or thought, as in the dismissal of uninspired, mechanical styles ([5], [6]), and it may even extend to portray physical appearances that are heavy-set or unimaginative ([7]). In this way, "stodgy" serves as a nuanced label for anything that feels inert, unimaginative, or burdened by age-old conventions.
- Five miles of stodgy clay and freezing sludge, And everything but wretchedness forgotten.
— from The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon by Siegfried Sassoon - He crammed the last pale, stodgy morsel into his mouth and pushed back his chair, saying: "I'll do the cloam for 'ee, mother.
— from Secret Bread by F. Tennyson (Fryniwyd Tennyson) Jesse - Their sworn duty was to war on those stodgy traditionalists who harbored principles which impeded artistic progress.
— from Robert Schumann, Tone-Poet, Prophet and Critic by Herbert F. (Herbert Francis) Peyser - We are surely a somewhat stodgy, money-making people with [167] far too little receptivity for new ideas.
— from The Better Germany in War Time: Being Some Facts Towards Fellowship by Harold W. (Harold Williams) Picton - It is more nervous, more varied, more rapid in tempo; it runs to more effective climaxes; it is never stodgy.
— from The Antichrist by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche - Tragedy soon fell back upon the fatally facile unrhymed iambic, and a reign of stilted, stodgy mediocrity set in.
— from Play-Making: A Manual of Craftsmanship by William Archer - Juror No. 4 was a stodgy old man, a small planter from the back part of the county, who fanned himself steadily with a brown-varnished straw hat.
— from Back Home: Being the Narrative of Judge Priest and His People by Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury) Cobb
