Word: fatuous
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...particularly concerned with the wider issues of his country's dilemma, went to England, France, Scotland, looking for a fence to sit on ; how he heard men declaim in taverns and ordinaries, breaking their clay pipes with the passion of their rhetoric ; and how, by a somewhat fatuous coincidence, he came at last to march with Greene's army through North Carolina. Mr. Boyd writes the language laboriously and without zest. He is not concerned with unities or nuances. He pays his subject the high honor of regarding it as more important than his treatment. The device...
...hold that Old King Cole's wide reputation as a ban vivant rests largely upon the gusto with which, in enumerating his postprandial wants, he demanded, first of all, his pipe. The bowl, the fiddlers three were afterthoughts. Such persons belong to the Old Jimmy-Pipe Club, a somewhat fatuous association fostered chiefly by columnists, mass advertisers and female novelists desirous of articulating Big He-Men; for, since Cole's day, tobacco has sunk to a low place in literature. The cigar usually proceeds from the stained teeth and loose lips of Mammon. The cigaret has become a stock...
...publications are to go beyond the mere exchange of overt advertising and to boost one another editorially. The Hearst papers do this continually. The result of such attempts may almost invariably be diagnosed by a glance at the "puff" which is printed as news or comment. It is usually fatuous, vapid. Its very effort to spread butter is nauseous and flat. The best publishing ethics has not yet forbidden this type of matter. Occasionally it turns up in the most respected journals. The New York Times is an example. Current History, a monthly journal of events, belongs to the Times...
...FATUOUS INSOLENCE Sinclair, one of the beneficiaries of Fall's prostitution of the office of Secretary of the Interior, follows Fall in refusing to testify before a Senate committee, on the ground that his testimony might incriminate...
...worthy efforts these symbols represent, but for the fancied prestige they infer. Failing to see that all glory depends on whole-hearted devotion to work, they attribute the glamor of the varsity letter to some intrinsic quality rather than to the strenuous efforts of generations of athletes. Their fatuous grinding away for "recognition" has for its goal an impossible flaunting of decorations, while the "big" man is invariably the least ostentatious. But the small pompous individual lusts to be clad in titles, honors, and ceremonies, and his narrowness prevents his seeing that "Art for art's sake" is the only...