spare

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spare (one) (something)

To not force one to listen to or engage in something, especially that which is tedious, dull, or unpleasant. I can see that you understand what you did wrong, so I'll spare you a lecture about it. Spare us the lurid details, James.

spare someone something

to exempt someone from having to listen to or experience something. I'll spare you the details and get to the point. Please, spare me the story and tell me what you want.

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References in periodicals archive ?

The sparest poetry--especially when set beside the false eloquence of some American poetry--may ultimately be the richest.

Report from the besieged city

The writing is sparest, even pointillistic, at the melodramatic climax.

Disiunct quatrains

10 Cleaning of radiators (DG Set, Alternator & Tractor (11) Seif Starter (DG Set, Tractor) (12) Heat Exchanger (Oil cooler) forturbine and sparest 13) AirCompressorforsulphurfurnace (14) Spare for Lubrication System (15) Steam Flow Recorder/Totalizer.

Repair of Vacuum Filter drum

And really, if there's a fault here, it's that the musicians are a bit quick to show off the tricks in their musical arsenal, when frankly, the strongest bits of the album are the sparest, the ones where the full force of the band's rage is both unfiltered and unadulterated.

Lost Profit$ burn it all down with new `Lucrum Et Amissio'

But the sparest, and most hard- hitting of the series are Nicola Okin Frioli's portraits of train survivors in The Other Side of the American Dream .

Tales of Lat Am resilience

Ruggiero provides a fast and efficient staging on the sparest of sets.

Make Me A Song: The Music of William Finn

For its first creation, Three Atmospheric Studies, opening at the Bockenheimer Depot in Frankfurt on April 21, the group teams up with New York-based artist Spencer Finch, who is known for catapulting viewers to historically and geographically distant places through the sparest of means: electric lights and color filters.

1000 words: Spencer Finch talks about collaborating with William Forsythe

My longtime collaborators, set and costume designer Robert Israel and lighting designer James Ingalls, created the sparest possible environment: The set was a vast, dirt-covered rake inset with four pits, out of which Puck would crawl; a few chairs; and an old table, on top of which "Pyramus and Thisbe" was performed.

A Midsummer" quartet

Eye care: Your eyes are surrounded by the most delicate skin on your face, its layers are the thinnest and its oil glands the sparest.

Beauty Style: Beauty secrets of the stars; Ole Henriksen is renowned the world over as being a master of skin care and his clients include some of the world's most beautiful women. Lisa Piddington meets the man the rich and famous trust with their beauty secrets

Neither does it faze them, apparently, that they may be significantly underestimating the depth of sentiment the public is capable of applying to even the sparest of architectural gestures.

Notre Dame's neo-classicists yearn to build grand old churches

One of the South Korean maverick's sparest and most dispassionate works, though still marbled with weirdly comic and tender moments, this quietly affecting item will play best to Kim's existing fan club rather than enroll many new members, with niche business in markets receptive to his pies.

Breath

His sparest canvases, with their transparent libidinal expression, only enhance that seductive tension.

"Ironic/Iconic". (Reviews: New York)

In The Janitor, 2001, for instance, one of Nordstrom's sparest compositions, a woman sits on an office desk, raising a sleek haunch to expose a shadow of genitalia.

Jockum Nordstrom. (Reviews)

There's all the more reason, then, to wish for a more exact (and exacting), less cluttered response to the play than Nunn offers up in a staging so over-embellished that one senses a failure of nerve in this sparest of texts to speak for itself.

BETRAYAL

The triptych has the sparest composition: Puffy white cloudlike forms meander across a gold ground lined along the bottom with blood bubbles, a rogue one floating above.