Word: meaninglessness
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...last famine helped to replace Haile Selassie's regime with a Marxist government, experts said that future starvation waves would be predictable and therefore manageable. Although the experts were correct in the first assertion, they didn't realize that no one would listen to their prophesies, rendering the second meaningless. Warnings of impending doom that began to surface two years ago went virtually unheeded by western governments, the media, relief agencies and Ethiopian officials themselves until it was too late...
...this makes for slow action; a static quality pervades the stories. There is no movement or direction; the stories are themselves suspended in time. The narrators try to relate episodes which encompass vast spans of time and succeed only in describing trivial incidents meaningless in themselves. Guessing, wondering, regretting, and yearning constitute most of the action in these episodes. The tendency is to pause and to look inside, silently...
Despite the Crimson's success this year. Carton, unlike many lifetime football players, isn't jumping up and down talking about coming to play, working together as a team and using a lot of other meaningless cliches...
...Scrambling units in current use weigh about 70 lbs. and take up the space of two filing-cabinet drawers. Electronics experts expect the new units to employ small, inexpensive microcircuits built directly into the telephone receiver. The scrambler converts signals produced by conversation into electronic "white noise" that is meaningless until disencrypted, or unscrambled, on the other end of the line...
...Another meaningless assertion by President Bok in his letter is that Black South Africans are divided on the question of divestment. Almost everyone I met in South Africa who opposed apartheid endorsed boycott and/or armed struggle as the only tactics available with any chance for success. I am sure there are others who would oppose divestment, but Harvard cannot be guided by some vague estimate of internal support for such action. First and foremost, it is a South African crime for any citizen, at home or abroad, to advocate divestment. Any evidence on this question would therefore have no statistical...