Word: trivial
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...just really distressed that the media are sending back trivial information about the rain and the buses," said Rosalie Bertell, a Canadian epidemiologist. "There is other, substantive stuff going on here." Observed Janice Engberg, an American who teaches at China's Xiamen University: "Some people have had incredibly horrible experiences, while some people are absolutely elated to be here. This is the most exciting 10 days in their lives." A reminder of the old, often misquoted Chinese curse: May you live in exciting times...
...society where several rounds of apologies will be made in the most trivial circumstances, the question of how to admit responsibility for the enormities Japan committed during the war has been a vexing one. Previous Prime Ministers used the term hansei, a fudge word meaning "regret," to express some measure of sorrow. Since his election last year, Murayama, a socialist at the head of an unwieldy coalition dominated by conservative Liberal Democrats, has been determined to show that Japan could at last admit its guilt. Liberal Democrats made sure the final wording of a Diet resolution was bloodless. So Murayama...
...smart and glib and redolent of the kind of backchat--over the top or below the belt--that fuels the fashion biz. "It's so major!" gushes Polly Mellen, creative director of Allure. The result could be trivial if director Douglas Keeve were not also focusing on Mizrahi's gathering nerves. The low point comes when a staffer brings in a copy of Women's Wear Daily that headlines the latest from Jean-Paul Gaultier, the tallest tree in Mizrahi's particular sector of the fashion forest. Gaultier's revelation? Eskimo chic. Mizrahi throws the paper on the floor...
...when they come home after work in the evenings and turn on their television sets, what our children find there after school or on Saturday morning. "Vast wasteland" appears in newspaper headlines, in book titles, in magazine articles, in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, even as the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question...
Probably the best thing that can be said for the show's copious gallery of Madrid flowerpieces by Juan de Arellano and others from the late 17th century is that they are skilled exercises in a trivial genre; they descend from earlier Dutch conventions-those towering masses of tulips and roses, full of squishy virtuosity; but they lack the architectural grandeur of earlier Spanish works and promptly induce surfeit. After them, the Spanish still-life tradition nose-dived into academism and decor through the 18th century, with the single exception of the Madrid painter Luis Melendez (1716-80), whose massive...