Word: vacuous
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...trouble with banks is that they all have vacuous names, stone fronts, impenetrable vaults, courteous tellers, identical services. In Pasadena, Calif, the president of First Trust & Savings Bank (assets: $16,331,000), tall, easy, white-haired James S. (for Smellie) MacDonnell, now 62, long ago found a way to kick his bank into the public eye. In 1917, as cashier, he won local fame by writing persuasive ads for the Liberty Loan and Red Cross drives. Since then, as president, he has sporadically taken advertising space in the Pasadena Post and Star News (morning and evening twins of conservative Pasadena...
...period who for some reason have not produced the consistently superior quality of work which would raise them to the very top, they have contributed much that is worthy of attention. Vivaldi, for instance, though primarily a violin virtuoso whose love of flash and dexterity often carried him to vacuous extremes, had command of form and gift for thematic invention admired even by Bach who borrowed extensively from his works. The Longy School faculty concert tonight at Agassiz Theatre will present Vivaldi's "Four Seasons"--decidedly worth hearing as a typical example of the formal clarity and facility of this...
...such is the quest for new titles to old dishes. And the tripe served up this time needs a new name, indeed. A lot of vacuous material is handled in a devil-may-care fashion, but the effect usually falls short of amusing. A soapy soap heiress (Bette) falls in love with a surly reporter (George Brent). She proposes to him in an up-side-down machine in an amusement park (where Bette is escaping from her normal position), in a manner so abrupt as to be calculated to take George's and your breath. The female proposal is standby...
...vacuous is vast Canada that the 90,000 assorted farmers, fox-breeders, lobster folk, oystermen and smugglers who have ample room on the 2,184 square miles of Prince Edward Island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence can boast that they are the Dominion's most densely populated province. Last week their ballots drove the final provincial nail into the political coffin of Canada's rich & prosperous Conservative Premier Richard Bedford Bennett who is now somewhat less of a national hero than Herbert Hoover...
...madness in their voices, the younger one babbling pointlessly and the old one muttering courses to himself. He curses his daughter and his dismal fate, his weak age and his cracking brains and the fool beside him. Lightening picks pot their faces at odd intervals. Rain glisters the brightly vacuous expression of the younger man. It sprays the old man, gray with pain and hopelessness, and blinds his eyes that are so dark with trouble, smoldering with anguish. It washes the hair down over his eyes, and mats his beard, lending an eerie, crazy look...