Word: trivial
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Naturally there will be those cynics who question the value of scientific material collected by school boys; there may even be those so ungracious as to suggest that high schools might well send to college, instead of trivial figures, rather students better equipped with the rudiments of necessary preparation. But such rusty Philistines are not in step with the times. It is the Galileo Highs of America which make modern secondary education what it is today...
...article, "How Trivial Are Modern Books?" by Mary Colum will interest those without any too definite ideas on literature. There is a fair review, with comment, of the trends centering around Flaubert and the Realists, and of the exudations of the followers of Charcot and Freud. The article eventually degenerates into a dissertation on style, with a great deal of maundering on "the passion of the inner rhythm." The worst fault of the piece is the conspicuous absence of a satisfactory answer to the question propounded in the title, and to the other questions raised...
...19th copy of your paper. Of his fondness for milkshakes and black canes, I know little and care even less. Perhaps his generosity to the blind newsdealer offsets his smug self-complacency. But to dismiss his contributions to historical scholarship and his activities as a teacher as "dull" or trivial shows a singular ignorance of the former, and a failure to appreciate the real wisdom underlying his teaching methods...
...fact that fat, squashy Charles Laughton looks almost exactly like Holbein's portrait of Henry VIII is really a very trivial aid to this picture. Laughton gives all his impersonations a preternatural vitality and if he had happened to look otherwise, it would merely have seemed that Holbein had been inaccurate. The whole picture, directed by Alexander Korda, reflects the validity of his acting: it is a shiny, caustic, understanding portrait of a personage as comprehensible as he is extraordinary. Elsa Lanchester (Mrs. Charles Laughton) does, next to her husband, the cleverest acting in the picture. Binnie Barnes...
...imposition on the rather credulous, a vast and cumbrous monkeyshine surely there can be no course embalmed in any catalogue that is so very trivial, so sadly and wholly useless as this. Its lectures may be amusing and sometimes even instructive, but the laboratory is the exhalation that kills...