Word: vacuous
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...chosen to use that ability more often. In the song "Tramp" on the album with Carla Thomas, Redding plays the part of a southern provincial. His lines are really hilarious, as when Carla accuses him of being from the Georgia woods and he replies in the most accurate vacuous Georgia woods fashion, "That's good...
...emotional-life-via-books, he could have turned even further--to real experience. After all, the girl was there. It was she who teased him into realizing he was unhappy and tempted him into reading. (Julie Christie plays both the wife and the tease. As one, she looks vacuous; as the other, she looks pallid--in fact, she looks as though she spent the first 16 years of her life drowning...
...responsible" but vacuous generalizations contained in their past letters can hardly be expected to command the same attention if they appear again above the names of these same 100 or 200 student body presidents and editors. For although the "leaders" have spoken of "constituencies" and have claimed to "represent" opinion, they have stressed that they are participating as individuals, not as representatives of any organizations...
...language. Then the play opens out into a kind of choreographic ritual of modern life, urban herds shuffling to and fro, the commuter's lock step, a cocktail party. It is apparent that interviewers and applicants alike need help: instead of the bread of life, they are fed vacuous cliches by intellectual bubble-gum blowhards representing the church, state, politics and psychoanalysis. One of the self-frocked priests of the Freudian age opens his mouth to say: "Blah, blah, blah, blah-hostile. Blah, blah, blah, blah-penis. Blah, blah, blah, blah -mother. Blah, blah, blah, blah-money...
...clothes like these!" (Moreau) "Hurry up! We're going to the dance!" Then the beginnings of an exit, such as you get on high-school stages when there's no room in the wings. It's clumsy, and unlike Malle. Some of these scenes might seem less vacuous to French ears deaf to the banal dialogue spoken in English. I suspect that one scene, where some Negro officials sit around sipping tea, is built almost entirely of phrases from English textbooks--"Pass the sugar," and so forth--and hence is an in-joke for any educated Frenchman...