Word: trivialize
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...evidence of Michael Hastings' austere docudrama, Thomas Stearns Eliot--banker, publishing executive, playwright, premier poet of this century--passed his domestic life on automatic pilot, while his mind found refuge and flourished in the Waste Land. The play's Tom (Edward Herrmann) finds it "an enormous effort to be trivial" with people. He husbands his passion for the empty page. He is the hollow man, a prune and a prude with the secret sin of genius, which must not be dissipated in ordinary intercourse. This Olympian diffidence, Hastings suggests, was sufficient to make the young scholar from St. Louis...
...boss, the First Lady is a stern taskmaster. Behind her back, some underlings mockingly call her Nana. When traveling, she has members of the entourage paged at restaurants to ask trivial questions, and phones them at home with petty requests. Even Deaver is cowed by the First Lady: last year, having incompletely quit smoking, he felt obliged to hide his cigarettes from her. A West Wing official who gets along well with her admits that she is sometimes charmless with her subordinates. "She is a demanding person in that she knows what she wants, she wants the best...
Make way for a fun-and-games Christmas. Stand aside for an avalanche of GoBots, Trivial Pursuits, G.I. Joes, Gloworms, Transformers, Cabbage Patch Kids, Care Bears and Rainbow Brites. Hold your breath for a flood of He-Mans and My Little Ponys. After two years of a sturdy economic recovery in which adult Americans got their goodies, it is now the turn of their children. Toymakers and -sellers are happily anticipating their biggest Christmas, and their biggest sales year, ever...
...popular items, Cabbage Patch dolls and Trivial Pursuit, both introduced ast year, are no longer simply hot-selling toys. They have now become American social milestones. Says Thomas Kully, a toy-industry watcher at the investment firm of William Blair & Co. of Chicago: 'Those two products are absolutely the biggest the industry has ever seen." Shipments of Cabbage Patch Kids and ancillary licensed products, including a board game, storybooks, decals and patches, will reach $1 billion in 1984. More than a year after they appeared and despite the fact hat Coleco, their manufacturer, does not even advertise them...
Meanwhile, Trivial Pursuit has taken hold of the nation. Last year all board-game sales were worth $200 million at wholesale; this year Trivial Pursuit alone will have sales of close to $400 million. An estimated 22 million Trivial game boards and question sets will be sold in 1984. The game's success has also helped revive old board favorites. Sales this year of Scrabble sets are up 27%, to 2 million, and dollar sales of Parker Brothers' Clue are up 20%. Psychologists and sociologists are searching for an explanation for Trivial Pursuit's phenomenal popularity. Says...