Word: trivialities
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Brave Popularizers. Rousseau apart, the brio of the age sings through its people-Gluck and Burke, Goethe and Charles III, Sheridan and Mirabeau, Marie Antoinette and Catherine the Great-who occupies a chapter of special delight. The volume is scattershot with fascinating and sometimes trivial notes: Mozart early in his career used to send obscene letters to relatives; in 18th century London, privies were called Jerichos; Boswell went to bed with Rousseau's wife precisely 13 times. The Durants can scarcely resist an anecdote or an aphorism. The borrowed ones are usually the best, as for instance Diderot...
...Dooling decision can be assaulted, with a good chance of success, in two ways. The Court contends that unless the applicability of the initiative is limited, the city will be flooded with expensive and trivial referenda. Surely, though, it is expensive to collect names and have correct papers drawn. Presumably it takes more than a burst of pique to goad anyone into organizing a referendum...
...special effect of a child describing some monstrous crime accidentally observed and only half understood, the special fascination of domestic detail mixed with horror and history-for instance, the dining room table around which her father habitually gathered the Politburo. Svetlana's mother shot herself after a trivial quarrel with Stalin. Her mother's relatives and intimates were victims of her father's paranoid suspicions, and "the life of almost everyone was cut short in some tragic fashion" -prison, firing squad, madness. When the Germans captured Svetlana's half brother Yakov during the war, Stalin refused...
...results of the pass laws is that they have led to wide arrests of Blacks for comparatively trivial misdemeanors like being in the wrong part of town without a pass. They also allow the white police to stop any African at will and demand his papers. The jail population is somewhere near 75,000, and there were 123 people executed in South Africa last year...
...Pick a Target. Beyond the major demands, there are thousands of trivial, and often ridiculous, issues to be settled. One local, for example, is asking for both free lunches and a share in the company cafeteria's profits. Another now wants magazine racks installed on the John doors...