Word: fatuous
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...house styles" by various publishers was, of course, common during Stevenson's lifetime, and is not entirely unheard of today. On a more substantive level, some sexual undertones in the story were muffled, and some mildly profane or irreligious sentiments were excised or rendered inoffensive. These changes now seem fatuous, but they did not accomplish what Menikoff asserts: "A finished and artistically sophisticated novel was reduced to a vulgar and meretricious shadow of itself." Henry James read this supposedly mutilated text and praised "an art brought to a perfection." Critic George Lyman Kittredge went further, calling the work as published...
...course, fatuous or cruel to call upon the poor to make sacrifices. They don't have much that they can squander in that direction. But in the broad American middle class, and in the enormous generation that came of age in the '60s, that fought on both sides of the Viet Nam question, there is a reservoir of latent idealism waiting to be tapped. Gary Hart almost found it. Mondale and Ferraro may be able to do so if they are sufficiently imaginative and creative to devise the forms into which that idealism might be poured...
There is a certain Panglossian spirit, sweet and fatuous, always at play in the margins of any discussion of forgiveness. Comedian Richard Pryor, in one of his routines, describes how he went to Arizona State Prison in order to make a 1980 movie called Stir Crazy. Before that experience, he said, he had recited a standard liberal line about the injustice of prisons. But after he met some of the homicidal brutes there and found out what crimes they had committed to earn their tuition, he said he was glad they had prisons with great big bars to hold people...
...mood. When rumors began circulating last week that Chief of Staff James Baker might leave his post to become commissioner of baseball, Baker made full use of the jocular material at hand. In response to reporters' shouts of "Play ball!," Baker pantomimed a pitch, and grinned at every fatuous request for tickets to the World Series. Even his colleagues got in a few cuts. At a staff meeting, Baker found an official major league baseball next to his coffee cup. Said another Reagan aide: "He's having some fun with the whole thing...
...incident has died down, we can't help thinking that Watt's biggest blunder was not that he purged the Beach Boys, devout though their following appears to be in the Reagan White House. The more significant faux pas, we feel, was to place them with the most unbearably fatuous entertainer this nation is currently enduring. Wayne Newton. Surely the public outcry would have been diminished if Watt had not selected, out of all the singers in the United States of America, a man whose performances are the musical equivalent of toxic waste...