(a.) Of or pertaining to Sparta, especially to ancient Sparta; hence, hardy; undaunted; as, Spartan souls; Spartan bravey.
(n.) A native or inhabitant of Sparta; figuratively, a person of great courage and fortitude.
Example Sentences:
(1) When Nicolas Sarkozy held his first comeback rally, he sweated profusely on a small stage in a stuffy and spartan gymnasium in the south of France.
(2) They built spartan, concrete residential blocks on their remaining property, subdivided them into scores of tiny rooms and rented them out to migrant workers from the countryside.
(3) Simultaneous measurements of biochemical and physiological events of compensatory renal hypertrophy were made in groups of white Spartan rats.
(4) The very first inkling of what would be dubbed the Bristol sound was the Wild Bunch's spartan treatment of Bacharach and David's classic The Look of Love , released in 1988 on 4th & Broadway.
(5) The American author Jonathan Franzen might justly be called a perfectionist: his latest opus, Freedom, took nine years of painstaking effort to complete inside a spartan writing studio – and is now being widely acclaimed as a modern masterpiece.
(6) Gaskill’s Spartan staging of Macbeth, with Alec Guinness and Simone Signoret in 1966, received dreadful notices that led to a ferocious tussle with the London critics.
(7) Opened last year by the Irish Youth Hostel Association ( anoige.ie ), its somewhat institutional architecture, utilitarian concrete floors and Ikea furnishings may be too spartan for some, but the bright interiors and views of Glencree valley more than compensated.
(8) Alfred Parsons (1864-1952) was noted for his vigour of mind and body and Spartan habits and his dramatic teaching.
(9) Nevertheless, again, unusually "normally" for a royal, he attended school, even if it was the notoriously spartan Gordonstoun.
(10) George Jameson, rallying with Reclaim Australia in a replica Spartan military outfit, said they weren’t racists and had come together to stand up for freedom of speech.
(11) There's a suggestion the player will also take control of another Spartan investigating the series hero – more on that later.
(12) His later years, as the preachments of abolitionists and slaveholders reached their shrill adumbration of bloody war, were marked, even made notorious, by his fiery championing of John Brown, whom he had briefly met in Concord, finding him "a man of great common sense, deliberate and practical", endowed with "tact and prudence" and the Spartan habits and spare diet of a soldier.
(13) The episode is illustrative of Sontag's emotionally spartan childhood, which produced a self-contained but not insular child.
(14) Orwell's letters were bucolic - lots of stuff about horses, flowers and fishing - but the references to the house suggest that 'spartan' may be too generous a description.
(15) For now, Halo spin-off Halo: Spartan Assault remains exclusive to Windows-powered device.
(16) *** Five hours before the People’s PPE meeting, I pitch up at a grim-looking office block next to Euston station, buzz the entry phone and go up a couple of flights of stairs into a warren of spartan rooms.
(17) 10.10am: Barry Glendenning's paper view has arrived to round up the Fourth Estate's perspective this morning: In the Mirror, Oliver Holt is busily fighting John Terry's corner, claiming that the former skipper deserves credit, not opprobium, for being the only England player prepared to speak out about the "spartan regime they have been living under for the last five weeks".
(18) Apart, perhaps, from Skipper's spartan office which looks out over a car park and the windowless neighbouring building of the department of work and pensions.
(19) It was here that he refined his incomparable talent for drawing, but in his early years he was drawn to history painting – young Spartans , Semiramis – and the dreamy style of symbolists such as Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Gustave Moreau .
(20) It portrays the heroic endeavours of 300 Spartans, under King Leonidas, who are shown resisting an invading force of 120,000 Persian troops led by Emperor Xerxes.
Stolid
Definition:
(a.) Hopelessly insensible or stupid; not easily aroused or excited; dull; impassive; foolish.
Example Sentences:
(1) The rhythm section is strong: occasionally stolid, always solid and sometimes – in particular on their career highpoint, the extraordinary "damn you, England" rant called "The Queen is Dead" – totally inspired.
(2) The menu is stolidly British – tea and biscuits, fish and chips and club sandwiches are favourites.
(3) As the Ohio State University climatologist Lonnie G Thompson, a world-renowned specialist on glacier melt, explained in 2010 , “Climatologists, like other scientists, tend to be a stolid group.
(4) He saw the new forces of educational selection in postwar Britain as yielding a new "restless elite", a creative minority rising above "the stolid majority".
(5) He arrived in office with the image of a stolid traditionalist, suffered some early wounding setbacks but emerged at the end of it as a pioneering campaigner in partnership with one of the most glamorous film stars on the planet.
(6) Ray (2004) The late Ray Charles is conjured up in all his playful, lustful, anguished glory in this otherwise stolid, respectful biopic of the legendary musician.
(7) To our left sat a stolid middle-aged black couple in the Mad Hatter attire that has become part of the South African football fan's kit.
(8) While Lessing's brother, Harry settled into a life of stolid conformity, she rebelled, graduating from a junior school run by nuns who had been out in the sun too long, to a high school which she left when she was 14.
(9) 58 min: Holland are looking stolid and unimaginative.
(10) 3.36am GMT 56 mins The lack of the overlapping full backs (Scott is no Yedlin) is beginning to make Seattle look a little stolid trying to play through this narrow Portland midfield.
(11) One by one, our equivocal hero seeks out the runaways: worldly-wise Zhora (Joanna Cassidy); stolid Leon (Brion James); the “pleasure-model” Pris ( Daryl Hannah ); and the group’s apparent leader, the ultimate Nietzschean blond beast, Roy Batty (the wonderful Rutger Hauer).
(12) The Guardian Review book club boasts a distinguished history of literary guests, but only Lessing achieved the distinction of a spontaneous standing ovation upon entering the room, a tiny figure dressed entirely in black, stolid as a carved deity.
(13) But Rjukan itself, until then, was stolidly unimpressed.
(14) When he comes back from the effects of a heart attack in his garden, it is with inner sensation – "an audible pop in the ears" – and a kind of self-spectatorship: "a rich consciousness of solitude, and a feeling of love and admiration for this big stolid body I was in".
(15) Led by the passionate Charles Parnell , and then by the stolid John Redmond , the Irish Parliamentary party’s obstructionism and filibusters won many reforms for Ireland.
(16) One kind morning I got myself to a meeting with a marvellous occupational therapist, Nicky deCourcy, who stolidly laid out a few facts, among them the detail that I wouldn't be able to cope for a while with more than two extraneous interventions – quiet TV plus reading, say, or radio plus writing – and that sudden urgent sounds would send me, in the medical terminology, a bit wacko.
(17) Now, Germans practise the stolid virtues of thrift and moderation we once thought our own, while the British, who once abhorred debt, have become a nation of maniacal spendthrifts.
(18) Orwell never explains why the stolid old Anglo-Saxon should be any more "clear" than such newfangled horrors; as "predict" and "extraneous" demonstrate now, words minted from the classical will very rapidly seem entirely normal.
(19) I was convinced that, for all its Thatcherite ugliness and excess, there was something about the UK's gritty liveliness that would leave the stolid Germans behind.
(20) By allowing TV cameras to broadcast the coronation at Westminster Abbey live to millions of her citizens the Queen transformed a stolid state ceremony into a national celebration.