Word: meaninglessness
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John T. Tate, Jr. '46, professor of Mathematics, opposed the plan. "I can't get excited about it," he remarked. "I'd prefer to give the present Ph.D. more freely." The new degree would eventually become as meaningless as the M.A., he explained...
...Meaningless Drill. In all the loud, repetitive argument, politicians and public lost sight of the fact that evaluation of enemy missile strength is a complex exercise, and honest experts may produce wildly varied estimates. As Secretary McNamara has learned, counting intercontinental ballistic missiles to measure a missile gap is a meaningless drill in arithmetic. For a country like the U.S., dedicated to the proposition that it will not strike the first blow, the problem is to build a retaliatory force capable of surviving any sneak attack. U.S. strategy requires that the very existence of that force deter aggression. If there...
...handled as elements in a four-dimensional collage. Camera and performers, moving at random and simultaneously, create the cubistic sense of evolving relativity. Foregrounds and backgrounds engage in a characteristically cubistic dialogue of planes. Similarly, noises and images, words and actions conflict or collaborate in amusing, revealing or intentionally meaningless ways. At one point the screen goes black in broad daylight while the characters go on talking-they are really in the dark...
...majority of undergraduates--including several Council members--just don't know what to make of the organization. The image of meaningless dictums, quorum-less meetings, and scandalized or uncontested elections still plagues the "new" Council...
This flawless (because meaningless) fragment of prose is offered as a parody of the once-famed gibberish of Gertrude Stein, and is the work of an unknown writer, Arthur Flegenheimer. It is one of the more recondite items in this anthology of Dwight Macdonald, critic, polemicist and New Yorker staff writer. To see just how recondite it is, the reader must not miss the footnote, in which it is disclosed that the obscure Flegenheimer is Mobster Dutch Schultz, and that the Stein "parody" is a police stenographer's transcript of his dying delirium. Such thimbleriggery is a fair sample...