Word: fatuous
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...When a member of the audience told Dr. Douglas Armour Thorn of Boston that in the U.S. "idle young people . . . exhaust nervous energies in the Boy Scouts and Y.M.C.A.," Dr. Thorn replied cryptically: "The American people have succumbed to a fatuous dependence on the cheerleader. . . . Our leaders lack the vision given to leaders in the totalitarian states which enables them to appreciate the vast magnitude of these [psychiatric] problems...
...review of a book with a most noble message-that of sterilizing the German race as a whole. If TIME is suffering from a paucity of reviewing matter that it gives such important space to the mephitic work of a man whose whole book is evidently based on one fatuous idea, let TIME's book reviewers look around for something which might contribute more to American letters or at least be newsworthy...
...Invisible Woman (Universal) gets off to a bounding start with an idea wonderfully suited to the leering talents of John Barrymore: he is a scampish scientist with a contraption for making people invisible. However, the story rapidly runs out of breath, thereafter staggers through a plodding plot about a fatuous young moneybags (John Howard) who is inexplicably attracted to the unseen subject of the Barrymorian experiments (Virginia Bruce). Added but unnecessary wrinkles are furnished by eyebrowed Oscar Homolka, a gangster who steals Barrymore's machine for nefarious purposes...
Retreat to Pleasure (by Irwin Shaw, produced by The Group Theatre) is an embarrassing attempt to mix farce, comedy and lofty social sentiments. A beautiful Ohio WPA administrator takes a vacation in Florida, where she is wooed by a valve manufacturer, a playboy and a fatuous young leftist-one of those self-righteous kibitzers who continually feels obliged to tell other people exactly what is wrong with them and with society. He wins the girl, only to spurn her in order to become a sort of wandering heart-of-the-world...
...seems to me that implicit still in everything we say or do as a people is a fatuous refrain: "We are the greatest democracy on earth...