Word: trivializing
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...exile to try to regain France. Nor was it precisely the great soap opera of redemption that occurred in the mid-'50s when the American people decided that Ingrid Bergman, disgraced adulteress, might be restored to favor. But somewhere in the historic procession from the majestic to the trivial, one might plausibly place Richard Nixon's trip to Hyden, Ky., over the Fourth of July weekend...
...something just before his death that made all his writings seem like straw," men like Albert Camus "seem to have 'seen something' which makes a good deal, anyway, seem like straw . . . What they had seen was terrorism, and it made even literature seem comparatively trivial...
...discomfort"). Amis wants poems that raise "a good-natured smile." He argues that "light verse need not be funny, but what no verse can afford to be is unfunny." He stresses the technical hurdles that the light poet must erect and then clear; since he is up to something trivial, the artist must do it perfectly. "A concert pianist," Amis writes, "is allowed a wrong note here and there; a juggler is not allowed to drop a plate...
This is the homestretch of the silly season, when state legislatures across the land seem to vie for the imaginary Golden Nit. There is nothing imaginary, though, about the time, effort and deliberation they customarily devote to the trivial, the insignificant, the utterly negligible. Nebraska's legislature, for example, has just dealt with a bill to add, as consumer representatives, two corpses to the state anatomical board: that passes for humor in Lincoln. Rhode Island's senators breezily adopted a resolution praising the hairdo of a female legislator, but the house turned aside a proposal to decree ricotta...
This legislative preoccupation with the trivial, which is confirmed in almost every state capital, goes by the term microphilia. Though the ailment was named only a few years ago (by a justly obscure political diagnostician), it has been in evidence as long as state legislatures have existed-though sometimes upstaged by more dramatic defects such as procrastination, carelessness and venality. These larger historic faults were undoubtedly in the mind of John Burns when he wrote in The Sometime Governments (1970): "We expect very little of our legislatures, and they continually live up to our expectations." In fact, many state legislatures...