outworn

“I had outworn my usefulness,” Watt said of his decision, adding that others “wouldn’t get off my case” about his insulting coal advisory panel comment.

“I had outworn my usefulness,” Watt said of his decision, adding that others “wouldn’t get off my case” about his insulting coal advisory panel comment.

The rest, alternating with hers, feature her former lovers, starting with the president and parading backward in time to her teen sweetheart: a gallery of outgrown, outworn or outmaneuvered men who have collectively furnished the indomitable Vita with an advanced education in the arts of transactional eroticism and remorseless self-promotion.

Could I remount the river of my years To the first fountain of our smiles and tears I would not trace again its stream of hours Between its outworn banks of withered flowers.

That “hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn, spaceship yarn,” as science fiction author Wilson Tucker memorably put it when he coined the term in 1941.