drab

ankea, ikävystyttävä, tylsä

ikävä

likaisenruskea dull Dull, uninteresting, particularly of colour.
1768, (w), (w), "The Mystery. Paris.", http://www.gutenberg.org/files/804/804-h/804-h.htm

(..) the man (..) was dress’d in a dark drab-colour’d coat, waistcoat, and breeches, which seem’d to have seen some years service:—they were still clean, and there was a little air of frugal propreté throughout him.

The coffee presently appeared, brought not as usual by the footman, in scarlet and drab, but by the old butler, in threadbare but well-brushed black (..)

Have you no longing ever to be free?

In warm, electric days to run a-muck,

Ranging like some mad dinosaur,

Your fiery heart at war

With this strange world, the city’s restless ruck,

Where all drab things that toil, save you alone,

Have life;

The sins of Kalamazoo are neither scarlet nor crimson.

The sins of Kalamazoo are a convict gray, a dishwater drab.

And the people who sin the sins of Kalamazoo are neither scarlet nor crimson.

They run to drabs and grays—and some of them sing they shall be washed whiter than snow—and some: We should worry.

Furniture is comical. It responds to humans. For some it looks its drabbest, for others it sparkles and looks, if not handsome, at any rate comfortable.

Old provincial society had ... its brilliant young professional dandies who ended by living up an entry with a drab and six children for their establishment ....

The doss house emptied during the day; from ten o'clock until five or six in the evening, there was no one there except Mulliver, a drab who did some of the cleaning for him, and occasional visitors.

(..) they say he keeps a Trojan drab, and uses the traitor Calchas’ tent: I’ll after. Nothing but lechery! all incontinent varlets!

Ineffable sarcasm underlined the word 'bride', suggesting that Mrs Mudge must be a drab who had married for respectability.

Ay, or drinking, fencing, swearing, quarrelling,

Drabbing. You may go so far.

(..) to ask us to subject our souls to its ruinous glamour, to worship it, deify it, and imply that it alone makes our life worth living, is nothing but folly gone mad erotically – a thing compared to which Falstaff's unbeglamoured drinking and drabbing is respectable and rightminded.