Word: merest
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...some of Aldrich's fellow alumni might lead to the selection of sons of men just like themselves--cultured, upper-crust, white. Aldrich neglects to name the brand of intuition he favors, but his rhetoric reveals his predilections. Discussing student opposition to master's choice, he writes, "The merest suspicion of discriminate assembly by students and housemasters raised the specter of an old Harvard of snobbish hauteur, the specter (oh, how hated!) of social class." The university spirit Aldrich wants ("a quality of self-confidence now always condemned as arrogance"), he finds in John Maynard Keynes's description...
...servants and Lassiters were at each other's throats, then at least the show would have some spark. But CBS is avoiding all possible controversy, including even the merest hint of racial tension between the black cook and the rest of the Irish staff...
Beatty and director Hal Ashby have given us the merest outlines of their characters, whom we see whirl through a single day in their lives, fitting about in a timeless vacuum. Combined with the constant striving for absurd humor. This one-dimensionality results in a statement about as profound as a movie of the Marx Brothers let loose in a beauty parlor. We encounter characters as self-centered as the businessman in Paper Tiger, who sets his clothing warehouse on fire to receive insurance benefits, characters as scheming as the young entrepreneur in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, who ignores...
...called it "the cattleprod," the theory being that today's audiences are so numb from perennial TV that a movie in a theater needs a long blunt instrument wired with several hundred volts and applied to an armpit, perhaps, or some appropriate erogenous zone, in order to elicit the merest twitch of a response...
...that surrounded and fed American pop have not by any means gone from the art scene, but they are muted. All the talk about how pop meant a democratization of the art experience, how it would obliterate the line between "art" and "life," has turned out to be the merest jive. It could hardly be expected to convince anyone in a world where Lichtensteins cost $50,000 apiece...