What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness.

The thing is all inescapable, mind-numbing, soul-grinding usualness.

Those within hearing distance merely shrugged their shoulders and smiled tolerantly at the disturbance as an affair of accustomed usualness.

Attracted by something new, accepting an unusual challenge, and then, once the challenge is overcome, being rapidly disillusioned by the usualness.”

These stories are largely about angry, dangerously disappointed males who are terrifying in their typicality, their American, gun-owning, car-driving, TV-watching usualness.

All three singers show good competency in florid work, which was not unusual in their day and has been coming back into usualness in ours ever since Maria Callas pointed the way.

The train came to an uncertain stop, and the sun and the poles and the trees faded, and his universe rocked itself slowly back to its old usualness, with Anthony Patch in the centre.

His father was unusual, Tony thought, and went on to think, complacently, that he would inherit this unusualness; he would be the unusual son of an unusual father spared the usualness of gray hair, baldness, obesity and fussiness.

But instead of being complimented, as a man might have been if told that his wife had married him because be was a good lawyer, or surgeon, or blacksmith, this unusual housekeeper, suffering a renaissance of usualness, denounced the guest as a liar, ordered him out of the house, and threatened to leave her husband.