workaday

“He wanted to present himself as among ‘the best and the brightest,’ not some common plebe who’d held workaday jobs,” Garrow said of Obama’s first run for the presidency.

The boring, workaday tasks of running his career and mindfully negotiating parenthood with Taketa are among the episodic A-plots leading the season.

In the beginning, there was the wharf, the rudimentary, workaday pier built to get goods from here to there.

An earlier building was destroyed by shelling during World War II. The small wooden church that replaced it was put to more workaday uses in Soviet times, when religion was suppressed.

Then, 50 men identically dressed in truncated gray suits and khaki overcoats entered in rows and, cued by the ringing of a taskmaster’s bell, performed workaday activities like typing and eating lunch.