Word: pointless
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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Fictioneer Outdone. Evelyn Waugh is no newcomer to the chattering kraal of African commentary. It is 30 years now since the young, not yet famous writer packed his traps for the Dark Continent. It seemed a pointless excursion at the time, but he was convinced that Europe was entering on a phase of barbarism, at the very moment the African races believed that they were emerging from it. The perception of that parallel lay at the heart of Waugh's satiric genius. His Bright Young People-the Mayfair savages of his English novels-were tribal kin to his jungle...
...plot is simple and tight enough but several factors have distended the play in such a way as to make it reflect, very effectively, the vigor and the sullenness, the intensity and the aimlessness, to which the actors are accustomed--loose and pointless dialogues, interludes of street dancing (choreographed by two of the girls, Pauline Dempsey and Elaine "Muzzy" Moscatel, often disinterested actions, often passionless speech, and informal acting heightened by improvisation...
...Jack Kerouac, the beats' most beamish boy. His characters ride a reeling carousel equipped with stolen cars instead of painted tigers, and to the reader they are mostly blurred faces. The trouble is that when the whirling stops, the faces are still blurred and the conversation still pointless-jointless. A happy solution has occurred to Author Kerouac; he has written a volume in which the whirling is continuous and the characters negligible - in other words, a travel book...
Fact is. no drug will cure frigidity, and no surgical operation will repair an unhappy marriage-although neurosis-knotted frigid women occasionally have persuaded doctors to perform pointless hysterectomies. Frigidity, says Dr. Linden, is not an illness in itself; it is simply a serious symptom of deep-rooted psychosexual conflict. Linden's stark conclusion: "The situation may be resolved if the woman patient can be restored to a truly feminine position. This would be the task of psychoanalysis. But even the most intense therapy may not be wholly successful, and many women must resign themselves to a less-than...
...migrant to the city is lucky enough to get a factory job, he is likely to find factory discipline Irksome and pointless.... Away from work he is more often than not herded into a wretched slum and exploited by the large, permanent underworld of beggars, vagrants, refugees, petty criminals and the like who manage some-how to survive on the fringe economies of the cities of the underdeveloped world...