Ground Down

She has hired an interpreter called Blue, but they have an edgy relationship: everywhere she goes, Robin encounters mistrust among a population ground-down by government dictats and poverty. ❋ Maxine (2009)

I imagine if you ran a hand over any surface in the gym you would not find dust, but the ground-down detritus of black waffle-bottom shoes. ❋ Kelly Simmons (2011)

In his previous, the soon-cancelled-by-HBO Lucky Louie, CK was a ground-down husband and father. ❋ Unknown (2010)

The drama, which seems likely to extend throughout the day, is not only a reflection of just how ground-down the procedural elements of the Senate have become. ❋ Unknown (2010)

Also we had to record all responses with shitty ground-down eraser-less no#2 pencils (which quickly became a valuable office commodity). ❋ Unknown (2007)

But I am burnt out, spent, ground-down and I need a vacation. ❋ Unknown (2009)

While the “tactile quality of books” is very important -- and Darnton describes holding up leaves of 18th century books to see bits of ground-down petticoat thread -- there are also positive dimensions to digital versions. ❋ Unknown (2009)

Chaucer's English was closely related to the dialect that eventually became standard, but modern English is a ground-down sort of language, said to be the most monosyllabic in Europe. ❋ Unknown (2008)

Who would have believed, viewing the moonscape of Kurdistan in 1991, that these ground-down people would soon have their own airline? ❋ Hitchens, Christopher (2007)

I wish the ground-down folk of Oaxaca well, of course. ❋ Unknown (2006)

They meet in the dreary shack where she has removed herself to become a ground-down baby machine for some prole. ❋ Hitchens, Christopher (2006)

Yet more depressing than these accounts of ground-down lives and state-ordained misery is the thought that no Burmese citizen will ever have a chance to read them. ❋ Unknown (2004)

Herculaneum would fall victim to Vesuvius only hours before Pompeii, where Attilius 'love for Corelia propels him on a nightmarish trek, searching for her amidst the "stumpy shapes of houses, like a row of ground-down teeth, only a few feet of wall left visible above the ground" and "hundreds of people ... milling around at roof-level in the semi-darkness, like ants whose nest had been kicked to pieces." ❋ Unknown (2003)

The Giant's Pate became only a ground-down prominence on one edge of the basin. ❋ King, J. Robert (1999)