Word: benignantly
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Despite the universality of interest in his death, Lennon remained chiefly the property-one might even be tempted to say prisoner-of his own generation. Some -those who regarded the Beatles as a benign cultural curiosity, and Lennon as some overmoneyed songwriter with a penchant for political pronouncements and personal excess-wondered what all the fuss was about and could not quite understand why some of the junior staff at the office would suddenly break into tears in the middle of the day. "A garden-variety Nobel prizewinner would not get this kind of treatment," said a teacher in Oxford...
...boys' reformatory. There was another house in the neighborhood where John and his pals would go to a party and sell lemonade bottles for a penny. The house was called Strawberry Fields. His boyhood was neither as roughly working-class as early Beatles p.r. indicated, nor quite as benign as the magical association of those place names might suggest. But John's adolescence in the suburbs, the garden outside the back door and the warm ministrations of his Auntie Mimi did not diminish either the pain or the sense of separateness that was already stirring...
Those who argue that hunting is a socially benign use of long-barrelled guns could be right; even if they are, the sport of some is not justified if even a few innocent people die as a result...
Just as there is a romantic tradition that robots are inherently diabolic creatures that will rebel against human control, there is an equally romantic tradition that machines are inherently benign, symbols of progress and perfectability. Isaac Asimov epitomized that view in a famous story titled Robbie, in which a much mistrusted robot baby sitter of that name rescues its ward from a speeding tractor. Asimov then went on to formulate, in Runaround (1942), what he decreed to be, in the world of science fiction at least, the Three Laws of Robotics: "1) A robot may not injure a human being...
...politician of great charm but less vigor, of coruscating rhetoric but lamentable lack of administrative skill. Even Foot's appearance arouses more affectionate regard than confidence in a strong leader. A frail figure at 67, with a flowing white mane and a slight limp, he exudes a benign vagueness in conversation. It did not help his image on his first day as leader when he tripped on the steps of the House of Commons and broke his ankle...