one-note
English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]An allusion to the monotony of a single musical note played or sung repeatedly.
Pronunciation
[edit]Audio (General Australian): (file)
Adjective
[edit]one-note (not comparable)
- (idiomatic) Having only one opinion, outlook, tone, etc., especially as expressed repetitively; without variety or range.
- 1971 March 13, Michael Sragow, “Theatre: Look Back in Anger Tonight at the Loeb Ex”, in Harvard Crimson[1], retrieved July 25, 2009:
- But Pope Brock plays him in such a one-note key of gulping and spitting and snickering cynicism that the spectacle becomes numbing.
- 1992, Jane Creighton, “Bierce, Fuentes, and the Critique of Reading”, in South Central Review, volume 9, number 2, page 66:
- The footnotes that attend Ambrose Bierce in the U.S. literary canon roughly place him as a minor writer of grotesque supernatural tales and trenchant war stories, a misanthrope, curmudgeon, a purveyor of stringing sarcasms, a one-note wit.
- 2005, Anahid Kassabian, “Academic Frostbite (A Cautionary Tale)”, in Women's Studies Quarterly, volume 33, number 3/4, page 403:
- To his mind, there was only one right and true position on the question. This sort of one-note response is precisely the problem facing politically engaged academics in the U.S. at the moment.
- 2009 June 18, Mary Pols, “Year One: Jokes from the Stone Age”, in Time[2], archived from the original on 2013-02-15:
- The movie is one long snigger. […] It might be one-note, but at least it's in the key of funny.
- 2011 June 3, Benjamin Mercer, “On ‘Drive Angry,’ the Schlocky Role Nicolas Cage Was Born to Play”, in The Atlantic[3]:
- Moreover, Drive Angry offers evidence that Cage hasn't recently been one-note in his performances so much as in his choice of schlocky material.