Word: meaningless
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...made readable, the stunting effect of philosophical detachment upon young people's emotional equipment would be fearful to contemplate. They might never have the slightest desire to rush out to war for the motherland. They might reason so broadly about government that fine old political issues would become meaningless and forgotten, and states would perhaps fall into the hands of dreadfully efficient automatons like the ones Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells put in their books, with no axes to grind, no slogans to shout and no fine frenzies to indulge...
...allegiance, that strength which kept the totem valid long after its vital life-force had disappeared. The formal totem became sc fixed that life could depart from it, yet its magic suffered not, for man breaks his idols and his gods but reluctantly and a dead and meaningless symbol is better than no totem at all. And the very enthusiasm with which the artificial loyalty is buoyed does hurt to the reality and the force of the totem, stifling it and distorting its true sense...
...into play, "S. Osgood Smith." He buys Bethlehem Steel stock and some rolling mills. In the last chapters, Paula is employing their millions to make their daughter's Semitic strain fashionable enough for the Junior League. To Sam, profits are unprofitable. Even the recurrent ghost of Evelyn has become meaningless. He endows universities with an absent gesture; lets his secretaries invent his excuses; fiddles with his radio. One program is interrupted by a ship's call, in which his daughter recognizes his initials?S.O.S...
...This is the plot of Theodore Dreiser's 'An American Tragedy' in two volumes, a work occasionally poignant, occasionally intense in its realism, often deadly dull, usually a monotonous narative of everything that happened in the course of Clyde Griffiths' short, worthless, and almost meaningless life...
...with sensitive apparatus in 70% of the experiments made. Men were said to be better receivers of transmitted thoughts than women. "The more accomplished a man is, the better he transmits and the worse he receives." It was not reported how the thought waves, when detected, were translated from meaningless physical effects into intelligible human ideas. U. S. scientists were skeptical...