Word: fatuousness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...case, you see a late neolithic pi, or jade disk--a circle of translucent greenish stone with a hole cut in the center, like a harvest moon rising, whose austerity reveals its maker's deep understanding of its material--the notion of progress in art seems more than normally fatuous...
...Catholic theology to the America First movement of the 1930s--the roots of Buchananism as a popular phenomenon lie much closer to home. Republican politicians who are looking for someone to blame for this spoiler in their midst should look in the mirror. Buchanan's populist demagoguery, his fatuous targeting of so-called elites, his pandering to white middle-class self-pity, his scapegoating of minority and outsider groups--all these are familiar themes of Republican rhetoric of recent years...
...when commenting on an explosive marital spat occurring next door, it is incumbent on a neighbor to be diplomatic and sympathetic. But must one be fatuous too? Here is Canada, a great neighboring country, choking on cultural diversity, very nearly dying of cultural diversity--and the spokesman for the President of the U.S. offers a mindless, mantra-like homily in praise of the very source of Canada's ongoing agony...
...chief health official of the state of Virginia, Kay Coles James, attracted the usual supercilious ridicule by urging abstinence as a policy to reduce teenage pregnancy. It will not do, of course. Teenagers will no more abstain from sex than will the frisking neighborhood dogs, and it is fatuous, punitive, Neanderthal to expect them to; the best that adult authority can do is to distribute condoms to the beasts and hope they will pause long enough to slip one on before their urgencies of crotch propel them into the hedge. If they do not take the precaution, well, then...
...politically divisive, its motivation is mean-spirited, and its intellectual premise is fatuous," said Sen. Thomas F. Birmingham '72 (D-Chelsea). Birmingham said many state laws have the effect of depressing property values besides rent control, including restrictions on supermarkets and skyscrapers...