The word hoary has appeared in 47 New York Times articles in the past year, including on July 12 in the book review "America for Dummies" by Dwight Garner:

• The least happy thing about "Across the Pond" is how hoary its range of reference mostly is. We are only on Page 2 before Mr. Eagleton hauls out that great taxidermied owl, Alexis de Tocqueville. He leans heavily on Charles Dickens's and Henry James's analyses of the American character.
• There's nothing wrong with this. But so many excellent and incisive things have been written about America vs. England by other writers, many of them still alive, that "Across the Pond" seems dated. It mostly could have been written in 1971, if not 1921.