Word: trivial
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This new regulation toward graduate students may be justified if there is abuse of the current system. When a voluntary sense of community fails, it is often necessary to institute formal and disagreeable regulations. I would submit, however, that abuse of scholarship programs by wealthy graduate students is trivial. I would also submit that abuse of the tenurial system by full professors is not trivial. If we are to have a Kraus formula for the former, let us have a similar formula for the latter. Perhaps a Committee of the Economics Department would be qualified to prepare such a formula...
...dropped some of the Monday-morning second-guessing from Washington. Agents could for the first time keep Government cars at home overnight instead of having to drive to a central garage after a long day. They could even drink coffee at their desks. With all those reforms, however trivial, said one veteran, "the agents thought they had died and gone to heaven...
Ordinarily, I wouldn't complain so much about music so trivial. Even her back-up band, Elephant's Memory, is approximately infinitely better than the material deserves. I wouldn't mind that Ono can't include even two enjoyable sides of music in a four-sided album. I wouldn't mind that she sings only stiff manifestos, enigmatic drivel, sentimental nonsense, or primal screams. What I do mind is a person who can use her connections to rip off the public and then pose as a liberator. Few other people could foist this embarrassment upon an audience, while far more...
...garbled leaflet of a local lunatic, are equal in their First Amendment rights. Marxists sometimes talk of the significance of "substantive," case-by-case, justice as opposed to the unimportance of a purely formal justice based on principles of equality. But the violation of formal principles, even in seemingly trivial cases, can lead to substantive wrongs in the long run. The principle of discrimination used to brand Mafiarun papers as "sham" one year can be used the next year to disqualify a Crimson reporter who is a member of a left-wing group...
Filled with guilt, concerned only with physical survival, the prisoner often becomes obsessed with trivial rituals and trivial goals. For instance, says Stenger (a prisoner himself during World War II), "it is routine to spend hours folding a blanket, because it is one of the few things a guy can do from which he can get a feeling of effectiveness if he does it well." USAF Major Fred Thompson, once a P.O.W. in Viet Nam, recalls devoting hours to an effort to train the ants in his cell to fetch crumbs. When that palled, he began building a dream cottage...