Word: fatuous
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Because of their freight of dismay, White's doomsday sketches are rarely as effective as, his verse. He greets spring in New York ("Pigeon, sing Cuccu!") and rags an author about a fatuous book on farming with a review writ ten in rhymed couplets. Using mock heroic stanzas and plenty of relish he relates how a Chesapeake Bay snowstorm turned back a submarine specially equipped for polar exploration, captained by an explorer who had sold his story to a publisher before even setting out. An almost perfect example of occasional verse is "I Paint What I See." It pits...
...public schools of their day. But Sowell dwells on much more than their cultural propensity for education; he sings the hymns that have distinguished the Jewish people for millenia: their resourcefulness, their adaptability, their reverence for knowledge, and their resilience in the face of oppression. His judgements are hardly fatuous, but the product of careful research and reflection. Sowell does a credible job purveying what usually passes for the stereotypes of certain ethnic groups as specific interpretations of their cultural inheritance. The Irish passion for alcohol may have arisen from the futility of life in a land where whiskey proved...
...wigh as much as he does--they come out undifferentiated, as if he'd learned them phonetically (tough this is preferable to his occasional bursts of temper, when he speaks swiftly and unintelligibly). His vision of Eden in Karen Dotrice's ghoulishly starved, black-lipped Desdemona seems weirdly fatuous,even half-witted. Throughout, there's something private about his grief...
...much American housing, of course, is panoramicaily 11 sipidmass-stamped suburbs as standardized as boxes on super market shelves, the endless Amway and Tupperware America. It may be fatuous to envision new splendors of design in a nation going to condo and cluster. But interesting, occasionally bizarre ideas are turning up. In the Midwest some builders are digging underground houses with skylights and atriums and a thick dome of earth on top that eliminates abrupt temperature changes from season to season. Friends, even strangers, are getting together to buy a house and share it. Under some arrangements, two couples...
Cruising's biggest boost of all may be the Love Boat connection. In a bizarre show of life panting after artifice, passengers scramble aboard the cruise ships with expectations that their hours aboard will replicate the determinedly fatuous ABC-TV series, in which two or three romances seem to occur per nautical knot and (old tars squirm again) Hollywood pretty-kins impersonate the ship's crew. The emcees sprinkle their repartee with Love Boat jokes ("The captain can marry you on board. Every marriage is good for four days"). The Los Angeles-based Princess ships, on which Love...