Word: trivially
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...everyone is overawed by the so-called knowledge explosion. "What happens," says Computer Scientist Joseph Weizenbaum of M.I.T., "is that educators, all of us, are deluged by a flood of messages disguised as valuable information, most of which is trivial and irrelevant to any substantive concern. This is the elite's equivalent of junk mail, but many educators can't see through it because they are not sufficiently educated to deal with such random complexity." To many experts, the computer seems a symbol of both the problem and its solution. "What the computer has done," according to Stephen...
Once you have this straight, the rest of the plot is traditional. The four lords fall for the four ladies. attempt to dissemble, then to break their vows, and are eventually taught by the ladies to sue for favor honestly, without resorting to trivial games. The transition to reality and perhaps maturity is completed by the unexpected news of the Princess' father's death, and all eight principals soberly vow faith and various types of atonement, as if ceremoniously renouncing the comic-traditional world that has held them in thrall...
...literary disaster." At work here may be the old harrumphing delusion of perspective: a Miniver Cheevy trick of eye and time Up close, most writers tend to look minor, to look like transient scribblers: aphids, small potatoes, twerps. One imagines a golden age long gone and a gray, leaden trivial present. effect is only heightened by the undiscriminating hype. One has to listen hard to hear any real thunder in the books...
...economic woes of American auto manufacturers, Economics Editor Dan Cordtz delivered instead a primer on currency exchange rates. Segments on successive days ascribed the singular position of "front runner" for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination to two men, Edward Kennedy and Walter Mondale. Both anchors made frequent if trivial mistakes: once Steve Bell even announced the time wrong. The show's other anchor, Kathleen Sullivan, who was wooed, perhaps not coincidentally, from a highly visible role at Cable News Network, was appealingly energetic, but often seemed ill at ease. She mumbled, misread, and even looked abruptly away when...
...many of the issues of the women's movement, from housework to abortion, were so basic to so much received wisdom that they seemed, by prospect or in perspective, either trivial or threatening. "Attention was finally being paid," Joan Didion wrote in a 1972 essay, "yet that attention was mired in the trivial. Even the brightest movement women found themselves engaged in sullen public colloquies about the inequities of dishwashing and the intolerable humiliations of being observed by construction workers on Sixth Avenue. ... It was a long way from Simone de Beauvoir's grave and awesome recognition of woman...