Word: vacuous
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Candle-Light. The chronicles of taste in the modern theatre contain the names of Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, Gertrude Lawrence and Leslie Howard on every page. And since taste succeeds even where substance is lacking, this English triune is able to make even such vacuous foolery as Candle-Light a matter for winks and nudges. Mr. Wodehouse translated it from the German of Siegfried Geyer, embellished it with his own impish slang and metaphor. Miss Lawrence plays the part of a cuddlesome lady with a crinkly nose who accepts a blind date over the telephone and presently finds herself received...
November hour exams, which always begin in October and eventually drool on into the month whose name they bear, have been the subject for many a long and vacuous dissertation. As topics for conversation they rival the tyranny of the Yard police and discussion of the current cinematic animadiversions. Extensive vocabularies have ornamented the theme; dire threats have furnished the motif. And consequent results of all this oratory have been, up to this time, entirely lacking...
...boundless, and everywhere in violent motion. Since matter is now known to be pure energy in complicated forms, the origin of matter out of the ether might be accounted for thus: the continuity of the ether was at some time interrupted by "an extremely minute cavity," a sort of vacuous bubble in equilibrium under the gigantic pressure of the surrounding ether. Sir Oliver pictured this bubble "spinning violently under the influence of the circulation which presumably extracted it." Such a bubble would have been but a new form of the energy of the ether...
...whistles, catcalls, boos, hisses. Princess Metternich sobbed. Wagner went to Vienna, since Germany had exiled him. Again, Prince Metternich, please. . . Tristan und Isolde was accepted, rehearsed 57 times, abandoned-the tenor was incompetent. Vexed, Wagner produced Der Ring des Nibelungen. King Ludwig of Bavaria gazed on that pageant with vacuous wondering eye. He was no fool. Even Frederick the Great had bent the knee to Voltaire. Ludwig would have Wagner's exile canceled, would give him a house. Soon the rotund, drab little man grubbed with filthy hands in his own garden at Wahnfried, Bayreuth, Bavaria. He was building...
Sirs: On p. 12 of your issue of Nov. 9 you quoted certain rather vacuous remarks attributed to the young Prince von Bismarck, grandson of the great "Iron Chancellor," now in this country as the guest of his cousin, Baron Leopold Piessen of the German Embassy at Washington. In your article you imply that Prince Bismarck is "commonplace," "Babbitt-tailored," a "fop," a "milksop." Will you not give publicity to the following estimate of Prince Bismarck recently penned by a gentleman whom I believe you have styled "famed Washington correspondent, Clinton W. Gilbert." His opinion is probably at least...