Word: triviality
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...summit, official patch-up stories were issuing from the White House. Raisa, it was said, had asked Nancy at the Soviets' Thursday dinner, "What is this about our not liking each other?" The First Lady described her Soviet counterpart as puzzled. "Such stories are so trivial and silly," Nancy Reagan said...
...there ever taken a course which is likely to be of any real use in later life, assuming of course that boring people at cocktail parties is not a useful function? After spending roughly $60,000 on becoming educated, do you feel that your ability to win at Trivial Pursuit has substantially improved...
...reviews won by Gorbachev's television performance ("A tour de force" -- San Francisco Chronicle) sparked grumbling that TV had given a slick propagandist a free platform from which to seduce the American people. The candidates' debate, too, was decried as another instance of TV's reducing complex issues to trivial matters of looks, performing style and catchy one-liners. Neither TV event, however, was a ratings blockbuster: both were soundly beaten by entertainment fare on the other networks...
...Name a group of important younger American critics, philosophers or historians," demands Jacoby. The fact is the naming comes hard, even on campuses, where the book has generated particular attention -- as well as trivial pursuit of rebuttal candidates. At Duke, for example, a recent faculty klatch turned up isolated, fiftyish nominees such as Susan Sontag and Joan Didion, but no fresh generation...
...Index, with its acontextual presentation of pre-cooked information represents the ultimate reduction ad absurdum of fast-food culture. But its not a bland offering, as the biases of the editors are clear. When the hyper-trivial is left aside, the statistics in the Index take potent swipes at the American zeitgeist and all its hypocricy and self-indulgence...