pluck

Still, the earnestness — Ronan and Harris Dickinson, seen briefly as a kind neighbor-turned-soldier, are pros at that — decidedly outweighs the unavoidable sense that we’re on a briskly engineered studio tour of character-building pluck.

To the massive relief of the state’s agribusiness, this outbreak and most of those to come — unlike the desolation of Florida’s commercial agriculture — were aggressively confined pretty much to small-scale commercial growers and to gentlemen cultivators with backyard trees, the kind of pocket orchards that had enticed Midwestern immigrants here with the promise that you could just step off your back porch to pluck your morning orange.

“Sometimes I want to say, ‘Oh, yes — let me just go out back and pluck one off the tree where they grow.’”

Pluck them from the narrative and it’d be difficult to pinpoint why they were there at all.

“He made a funny motion as though — well okay why don’t you take them with you to your hotel room and if there’s anything really bad in there, like, you know, pluck it out,” Corcoran’s notes read, according to the indictment.