Word: trivial
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...executive, celebrated its 350th anniversary, and braced itself for drastic budget cuts due to a statewide slash in property taxes. Some of the big stories at Harvard--a proposal to restructure College governance, the establishment of a new concentration in Literature, and even the Harvard-Yale game debacle--seem trivial when compared with the national events of the past year. But rightly or not, the University has a tendency to get wrapped up in itself; and even when it is not caught up in self-examination Harvard often views outside events through a wall...
...1960s tried to raise defense spending without increasing taxes at the same time, and the result--as Republicans have joyously pointed out for at least a decade--was a knot of inflation that paralysed the nation. The order of magnitude of the Lyndon B. Johnson precedent seems almost trivial by comparison. And Reagan might well remember the inflationary jolt of the early 1970s that came when the Arab states increased their oil prices. Under Reagan, energy has magically disappeared as a cause of inflation, but, in fact, our national reliance on a costly and uncertain flow of oil from...
...allow individuals to open tax-deductible retirement accounts whether or not they were covered by private pension plans. Another, says Feldstein, would be to Increase exclusions for dividends and interest received to $1,000 or even $2,000 from the current $200 per person, which he regards as "too trivial to be much of an incentive...
...impressionistic paean celebrated "the superficial truth of streets and structures, the trivial truth of reality." Subsequent early stories offered the kind of warming uplift that a Depression-stricken nation wanted to hear. But there was a scratchier side to this earthy romanticism. In 1940 the playwright rejected a Pulitzer Prize for the Broadway hit The Time of Your Life on the grounds that business could not judge art. As a Hollywood scenarist he squabbled with studio heads and cut a raffish, boisterous figure Gambling and drinking contributed to the breakup of his marriage and the decline of his fortunes...
...weave, or color distinguish the merely good from the Prep. A small percentage of polyester in oxford cloth shirt of a lapel that's a quarter of an inch too wide can make all the difference." Only that idle elite can afford to spend time learning to detect such trivial differences and can squander money paying for them. What a pity that the rest of us are not the beneficiaries of a higher education similar to that of Birnbach et al.; we too might learn not to perspire in the shade of palm trees and tennis courts...