Word: stupid
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Dates: during 1870-1879
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...serious societies may be dismissed with a word. They are wretched, dead affairs, which are only held together by shingles and seals. If you join one, you will attend a meeting or two, find it stupid, and afterwards stay away. The treasurer will send you a bill or two, which you will forget to pay. Your name will be posted, but nobody will read it. And in the end you will resign, having gained no advantage except a certificate of membership. The truth is that French clubs and German clubs and chess clubs have no real reason for existence...
...thing which you will be ashamed, if need be, to confess. If you are true to yourself, you will never know what shame means. Make up your mind to be something, whatever that something may be. And be, if you can, something more than a prattler of stupid advice like...
...have any business, never speak of it out of business hours. Change your clothes when your work is over. I have known some ordinarily stupid men to be witty in evening dress. Pick up all the information that comes in your way. Reading, I know, is often a bore; but it is not difficult to supply its place with the aid of the American one-sidedness of some talkative old specialist. If you want to know something about a legal point, you had better ask a question or two, and start off an amiable lawyer on his profession...
...season's crew, I sat down and wrote out the very same ideas as now appear from Mr. C.'s pen, intending to send the article to one of the College papers; but I desisted for the reasons, first, that I could not write temperately concerning what I deemed stupid obstinacy on the part of Harvard boating-men; and, second, because I could not claim to have been a University oar. But now that the idol of the Harvard oar has received one square blow, I am tempted to endeavor to administer another, hoping thereby to knock said idol completely...
...more like my own, betrayed their confusion by blushing, stammering, talking like idiots, and playing alternately with their gloves and their watch-chains. All this was very entertaining, but at the same time it was so difficult to discover a man whose behavior was not either offensive or intolerably stupid that I confess that I was very much disgusted...