It's a rather mediocre looking dragonfly.

Mediocre. Do you have any others?

Don't live a life which is monotonous, mediocre, meaningless.

Since he's a mediocre musician, they take me, not him.

You're like a small child, happy as can be with his mediocre life.

The quantity of food is insufficient and its quality mediocre, maize being the main item of nutrition.

Someone who has done something like this, however mediocre and throwaway, has tried something, has put something forward in public.

But one thing I cannot forgive the boredom of having to listen to your verses your secondrate songs, your mediocre performances.

There is a spectrum between mediocre work and good work, and as anybody who's worked as an artist or a creator knows, it's a spectrum you're constantly struggling to get on top of.

And it's not, but we think speech My God, little children pick it up somehow, and by the age of two they're doing a mediocre job, and by three and four they're speaking reasonably well.

LONDON Dramatic challenges, and mediocre responses that is the history of the European Union. All too rarely does the EU rise to the level of events, which is why Europe is fading economically and geopolitically.

For instance, corporations, especially in the financial sector, reward too many executives richly despite mediocre performance. But apart from tarring too many with the same brush, there is something deeply troubling about this narrative s reductionism.

As much as I loved playing basketball, I was destined never quite to reach six feet in height. An accurate jump shot and the willingness to take punishment never made up for my size and mediocre leaping ability.

As individuals in such regimes ascend the hierarchy, patronage and risk aversion become the most critical factors in determining their chances for promotion. Consequently, such regimes grow increasingly sclerotic as they select leaders with stellar resumes but mediocre records.

With some exceptions (a particularly troubling one is Venezuela), democracy was consolidated in the region. Elections have given rise to some capable governments and some mediocre ones, but only the lunatic fringe would advocate political change by means other than the ballot box.

In the words of Christine Lagarde, the International Monetary Fund s managing director, we are experiencing the new mediocre. The implication is that growth is unacceptably low relative to potential and that more can be done to lift it, especially given that some major economies are flirting with deflation.

If your debt becomes unsustainable because you borrowed too much to take long vacations or buy expensive appliances, your bad behavior is to blame. The same applies to corporate firms some have bad luck and their business plans fail, while others borrow too much to pay their mediocre managers excessively.

The reality is the opposite for several reasons, growth will slow further in the second half of 2012 and be even lower in 2013 close to stall speed. First, growth in the second quarter has decelerated from a mediocre 1.8 in January March, as job creation averaging 70,000 a month fell sharply.

But that alliance is unraveling as Germany s own status declines, owing to its mediocre economic performance and the loss of its prestigious Deutschemark. Moreover, Germany is increasingly interested in exercising political influence on its own as a result, it is no longer happy with what it gets from the alliance with France.

That's me shooting, and I'm a fairly mediocre operator, so I got that nice sense of verisimilitude, of a kind of, you know, following the rocket all the way down, and giving that little sort of edge, I was desperately trying to keep it in frame. So then I come up to the next thing.

But if, for whatever reason, the global economy fails to take off, we will have to reconcile ourselves to a long period of mediocre growth in which cheap capital depresses yields, drives up asset prices, inflates bubbles, and seeks out trophy assets. These are not the sort of imbalances to which the world s policymakers should aspire.

That is why the G 20 should work to encourage public investment within member countries, while international financial institutions, development banks, and national governments should seek to channel private capital toward public investment, with appropriate returns. With such an approach, the global economy's new normal could shift from its current mediocre trajectory to one of strong and sustainable growth.

Given the sharp contrast between Premier Wen Jiabao s caring attitude during the earthquake and President Hu Jintao s mediocre political performance, some people could not help but imagine that the earthquake may have tipped the balance at the Communist Party s highest levels, pushing the liberal forces represented by Wen to the center of power. But this is naive.

SINGAPORE In recent weeks, there has been a chorus of opinion arguing for a sharp increase in global investment, particularly in infrastructure. Former US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers asserted that public investment really is a free lunch, while IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde has argued that an investment boost is needed if the world economy is to overcome a new mediocre.

Had it not been for the world economic crisis, or if it ends up being short and shallow, many observers, including me, remain convinced that Mexico can continue to muddle through, as it has done since 1996. These past 13 years have been fair to middling for the country mediocre economic growth, but no collapse democratic rotation in power, with no uprisings or massacres a slow but steady expansion of the middle class and a slow but steady drop in corruption.