Word: fatuousness
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...answer: one successful scriptwriter, David Rintels, when criticized for one of his scripts, protested, "I stuck to the record, except in intimate scenes where there was no record." You don't have to be O.J. Simpson to drive through such a hole. Networks, too, get pretty fatuous when they defend their truth bending. When a committee of scientists objected to the way the networks played up and glorified pseudo science in shows like NBC's Bermuda Triangle special, a network spokesman explained that it was put on by its entertainment division and had not been labeled...
Friendly or merely fatuous, Americans seem to be first-naming everyone-lovers and strangers alike-with promiscuous enthusiasm. Even Boston has capitulated. Mrs. Alfred Titcomb, a dowager of Beacon Street, has decreed that henceforth she wishes to be addressed as "Mildred." The champion American first-namer may be Harold Davis, chairman of Georgia State University's journalism department, who says that he knows 10,000 people by their first names; he even teaches a course in how to duplicate this quintessentially American feat. Says Harold: "We are in a first-name society. Few people are called by their last...
Mary Martin, Litt.D., entertainer. You can make the most fatuous line radiantly credible or move an audience to tears merely by standing still and smiling...
...support this bold brief, Douglas, who teaches at Columbia University, has rummaged through the cultural bric-a-brac of American Victoriana-ministerial bombast, dreadful 19th century novels, and fatuous, hypocritical ladies' magazines. She has made the proper linkages to British Victorianism and German romantic philosophy. She has analyzed the lives and works of 30 women and 30 liberal clergymen (there was a high percentage of literary Unitarians). There is an excellent chapter on the life of Margaret Fuller, the American Transcendentalist who challenged the sentimental female stereotype by participating in the activity and danger of Italy's struggle...
...often infused his fiction with a force that transcended the clumsy writing. Before long, however, even his primitive power seemed to have fizzled away. Such novels as Go to the Widow-Maker (1961) and The Merry Month of May (1971) were not only badly written but also burdened by fatuous philosophizing...