Word: driveling
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Having thus taken Congress to task for talking about the wrong things, the Senator damned some other topics as irrelevant: "In my view, the talk about the President or any other personage dragging the country into war is the sheerest drivel. The only person on earth who may drag this nation into war is Hitler. . . . His pledged word is not worth a thrip.* He is a fervent believer in the immoral Machiavellian doctrine of the end justifying the means, however vile the end may be. He has repeatedly lied as to his purposes since the deplorable Munich conference...
Like the bombshell of the German-Russian Pact (TIME, Aug. 28), it changed everything. The overworked boys in the German Propaganda Ministry, shipping outworn drivel about Polish atrocities, felt its influence. Russians behind their frontiers watched their new German friends approaching, mobilized, advanced with full arms to meet them (see p. 28). At Copenhagen the Prime Ministers and Foreign Ministers of Sweden, Norway and Denmark hastily met. The wool-importing firm in Amsterdam, driven to the wall (see p. 19); the Greek Permanent Under Secretary of State flying to Rome; the correspondent in Turkey writing feverishly of "a situation baffling...
Cornell University's outspoken Professor Otis Freeman Curtis, a plant physiologist, has long wondered why educated people are such easy marks for propaganda and hokum. His patience has been taxed beyond endurance by the radio drivel of professors of astrology, by antivaccination and anti-whatnot laws, by a science professor who became a Faith Healer and let his son die of appendicitis without consulting a physician. Last fortnight Professor Curtis' patience finally boiled over...
...spokesmen of the foreign press have been telling idle tales that the purging of Soviet organizations of spies, assassins and wreckers like Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Yakir, Tukhachevsky, Rozengolts, Bukharin and other monsters has 'sapped the strength' of the Soviet system and caused 'demoralization.' This inane drivel is worth nothing but ridicule...
...real drama propels Rice's story. Only flag-draped speeches and Fourth-of-July sentiments drift across the stage. Ghosts do the work, all too picturesquely, that cries out for living men. At its worst, the play is mere drivel. When the final curtain comes down on the family drinking a toast, it seems like the conclusion of a homemade English boarding-school playlet. When Moll Flanders (Isobel Elsom) rustles archly across the stage in her duchessy silks, mouthing fancy, ye-old-tea-shoppe truisms, she brings to mind Penrod and his friends acting out Mrs. Lora Rewbush...