Word: fatuous
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Neill, a goodhearted, leather-faced teamster, and his shrill, shapeless, ill-natured wife Lizz. It broke off when the O'Neills collected $1,000 after their son was run over. Written in the same slow tempo as Farrell's earlier works, with characters who were fatuous when they were not brutal, it gave an even more dispiriting picture of a sodden, sullen, sick environment, revealed no new facet of either Farrell's talent or of the life of the neighborhood...
...chub-cheeked, eight-year-old boy, dressed up like a minister. No masquerading moppet but a real ordained parson, the Rev. Charles Jaynes Jr. was in the act of marrying the young couple. The ceremony performed, he ordered the groom to "kiss the bride." Then he added in fine fatuous style: "Come around tomorrow night. I think you'll find the sermon interesting. It is on the five wise and five foolish virgins...
...When the next best-seller type appears, he aims at it ("I can learn much of style from David Grayson," he writes). In 1936, 30 years later, his aim is still waving around, but he hasn't fired a shot. He just goes on filling his journal with fatuous, trite, sentimental, philistine, ingenuous, graphic practice notes: about newspaper jobs in Cleveland, San Francisco, Denver, everything from news happenings to a synopsis of his novel (a stupendous family chronicle from Jeremiah I to Jeremiah IV), from election returns to querulous data on his wife's raising the baby...
...reading Sherwood Anderson, Dreiser, Hemingway, confesses that his "whole attitude toward literature is undergoing a renascence." When, despite his sobered new outlook, he continues right up to his sudden end to be almost as dumb as ever, most readers will call his story a libel on even the most fatuous of would-be novelists...
...humble ivory," Fitzgerald wrote, "it was arrogant, imperative, often megalomaniacal ivory.' Since Lardner's death nobody has carried on his work as laureate of this thick-skulled world; nobody has caught the tones of its odd, original speech, or the flavor of its half-ironic, half-fatuous humor. But with a collection of brief sketches published last month, a young Manhattan reporter looked like the most promising candidate so far for Lardner's vacant post. His stories showed much of Lardner's tormented sympathy for voluble boneheads, a good deal of his ability to write common...