Word: fatuous
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...other hand, many people have supposed that as a member of a high-principled and benevolent Eastern family, he would not be found on the side of Mundt-McCarthyrite principles. His support of the student loyalty oath, that fatuous relic of the hysterical era which no other Western country would be silly enough to dream up, comes as an apparent shock...
...Cuban exiles who live near Miami and glower across the Straits of Florida at Fidel Castro, last week's opportunity for a propaganda blow was irresistible: 2,000 U.S. travel agents were freeloading on Castro in Havana in a convention dedicated to the fatuous proposition that present-day Cuba is a tourist paradise. Off from Florida went a DC-3 loaded with anti-Castro leaflets, which fluttered down upon the Cuban capital. Fidel Castro, shaken by a key defection in his rebel army that same day, and reports that terrorists were at work, filled the air with machine...
Official reassurances that U.S. space programs are really "in very good shape" (Defense Secretary Neil McElroy, November 1957) keep oozing out of Washington, but they seem fatuous in view of Soviet space performances. With their boasts about the U.S.'s more "sophisticated" space hardware, Washington officials sometimes sound as if they think that U.S. and Soviet rockets are engaged in a beauty contest instead of a race for national prestige, power, and perhaps survival. The plain fact demonstrated by the latest Soviet moon shot, and the shot that hit the moon on the eve of Nikita Khrushchev...
...biography. His quest takes him to a college chum of Sebastian's at Cambridge who recalls a miserable emigre trying desperately to be more pukka than the sahibs. (Nabokov graduated from Cambridge in 1922.) Next, the half brother interviews Sebastian's secretary and literary executor, a fatuous bundle of sociological cliches. Then there are Sebastian's two mistresses. As the investigator probes on, it is not one Sebastian Knight who emerges, but a different Sebastian for every relationship. The gist of the secret that the half brother learns is "that the soul is but a manner...
This impassioned and vague plea has its interesting aspects, but seems fatuous. It implies, or rather assumes, the existence of a determined and self-conscious attitude among the writers of post-adolescent love fiction. These tales are obviously intensely personal things and their authors doubtless believe that they are probing the situation to the very limit, which they very well might be doing. It seems a bit ludicrous to hope that a new moral framework (if indeed the whole idea has any meaning), will come from the pens of a group of writers whose entire effect comes from the charm...