cheerless

Cashiers at the supermarket knew them as a quiet, cheerless family that shopped several times a week.

Set in an especially cheerless pocket of Southern California, where high-voltage lines loom over the sparsely treed landscape, it opens in the summer.

“It’s nothing fancy,” the employer says, clearly believing otherwise, as the nanny’s smile fades in the gray, cheerless light.

It was a signature cartel threat demanding that debtors pay up or face a cheerless alternative — a shower of lead, i.e., bullets.

"The beer situation is very cheerless," said Anton, a 36-year-old IT expert who works for a state financial organisation in Moscow.