Word: meaningless
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...team becomes a good team. A meaningless, preseason game becomes a meaningful, regular-season showdown...
None of the candidates in Little Rock could rightfully claim to have captured the mind of the South. Jesse Jackson, with his characteristic charismatic cadences, triggered the most enthusiastic response. Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee, the only Southerner in the race, won a meaningless straw poll. Missouri Congressman Richard Gephardt was rewarded with a standing ovation, and Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis provoked the most curiosity. But it was Republican Senator Robert Dole of Kansas who got off the most telling line. Referring to the never ending quest of Southern Democrats to find the ideal moderate candidate, Dole observed, "The perfect...
...pomp and circumstance are not meaningless pageantry. Parliament's ritualized opening is a reminder of the enduring roles of British tradition, of the monarchy and of the two houses of Parliament. All contribute to an unwritten constitution etched in customs and laws but not contained in a single document. The constitution has evolved in this way, says Historian Philip Norton, because, since the Norman invasion in 1066, there has been no point at which the system "has been completely swept away, allowing those in power to sit down and create from first principles a new and clearly delineated form...
Vanderbyl is responsible for more superb corporate logos than any other designer of his generation. Ordinarily, logos tend to epitomize the worst tendencies of modern design: distilling a complicated business into one simple symbol almost inevitably results in bland, meaningless abstraction. Vanderbyl's best occupy that ambiguous zone just this side of abstraction; although highly refined, they suggest serendipity and imperfection, the real world in other words. For a World War II shipyard turned condo development, a star of horizontal stripes is given a trompe l'oeil, waving-flag wrinkle. For a printing company, a triangle is composed of lithographic...
What fun A.N. Wilson has with these foolish mortals. Love Unknown is his tenth novel, and his command of caustic social comedy seems complete. He is pitiless in describing the cliches of adultery so eagerly embraced by his lovers -- Simon's nattering about whether his many "meaningless" affairs have rendered him unfit for nobler passion, Monica's inflating to Wagnerian grandeur her demand that he leave his wife. Meanwhile, domesticity grinds on relentlessly, and it is the urgent and unpredictable demands of his large, eccentric family that finally defeat Simon...