one-note en · ADJ
Pronunciation
- (Australia) audio
Etymology
An allusion to the monotony of a single musical note played or sung repeatedly.
Meanings
-
(idiomatic, not-comparable) Having only one opinion, outlook, tone, etc., especially as expressed repetitively; without variety or range.
But Pope Brock plays him in such a one-note key of gulping and spitting and snickering cynicism that the spectacle becomes numbing.
1971 March 13, Michael Sragow, “Theatre: Look Back in Anger Tonight at the Loeb Ex”, in Harvard Crimson, retrieved 25 Jul 2009:The movie is one long snigger. […] It might be one-note, but at least it's in the key of funny.
2009 June 18, Mary Pols, “Year One: Jokes from the Stone Age”, in Time, archived from the original on 15 Feb 2013: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.
1992, Jane Creighton, “Bierce, Fuentes, and the Critique of Reading”, in South Central Review, volume 9, number 2, page 66: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.
2011 June 3, Benjamin Mercer, “On ‘Drive Angry,’ the Schlocky Role Nicolas Cage Was Born to Play”, in The Atlantic: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.
2005, Anahid Kassabian, “Academic Frostbite (A Cautionary Tale)”, in Women's Studies Quarterly, volume 33, number 3/4, page 403: