Word: vapidly
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Dismissal of a huge extravaganza such as that which has held Chicago and, by radio and press, the entire nation spellbound, breathless and even unconscious, on the varying grounds that it was vulgar brutality, misdirected energy, or vapid inanity is begging the question in a conventional and entirely superficial fashion. The annual battle of the century may have been all of those things and many more, but since its power was so tremendous it can scarcely be passed off as just one of those things. The columns devoted to the private life, if they may be said to possess...
...waste valuable space in your columns publishing such vapid letters as that of Charles A. Boston [TIME, June 6], who wishes to create the impression that he is so busy that he cannot stop occasionally to read something that will keep him abreast of the times. That doesn't interest your readers. He must have been the man, a friend of whom wanted to give him a book for a birthday gift, hearing of which another friend said: No, don't give him a book...
That this is neither vapid nor too expansive is proved by even momentary thought. For where would the world be without any one of the three. It was a kiss which sealed the doom of at least one martyr, which saved from doom at least one saint. And how many of the grand monuments of literature have subsisted on the strength of their purple passages, begermed but satisfying. As for powder puffs. Well, at least they have created a "Kiki" and have cured one defect in woman's beauty. For even Dido must have been chagrined to see the gleam...
When Basil Dean suggested that the theatre in England was in a less vigorous position than the American he had probably seen "The Young Person in Pink", For Gertrude Jennings' play, now in its first week at the Copley, is certainly insipid, if not devitalizingly vapid. Three acts of gentle farce, it rests its right to existence on a pink dress, a skit in the best Hyde Park cockney, and--at least in America--on Alan Mowbray's smile. To say, "The smile's the play," is not to vaporize. It is the truth. And all the more surprising...
...metaphysics have sent Sutton Vane's play into the limbo of provincial stock productions. So his philosophy of rat trap existence, a philosophy which saw nothing in heaven or hell but the doubtful happiness of "carrying on"--and "There's no discharge in the war," now suffers the vapid appreciation of stock audiences. And the Copley crosses the Styx...