Word: triviality
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...great packager" who tricks up boxes and labels, Designer Loewy lures U.S. consumers into buying more soap, lard, perfume and hair oils. If he did nothing more than such trivial things, consumers might well wonder what benefit, if any, they get from his work. But he also works just as hard making all manner of things better and more usable. His new vacuum cleaner (Singer) is the first which is designed to be hung up flat against a closet wall. Foley Bros, department store, in Houston, was the first department store designed so that a shopper could walk through...
...hazy film of satire, or at any rate of spoofing, hangs over Yes, M'Lord. But in general Playwright Home seems to have done his best to make everything as inconsequential as possible. The play's weakness is not so much that it is trivial, as that it grows tiresome; its scenes are all played twice, including some (like Tony's with the parlormaid) that shouldn't be played at all. But there are compensations: some bright nonsensical chatter, some skillful British acting. As the butler. George Curzon. though effective, has himself rather too good...
Form-conscious Director Walsh can set up a trivial shot of gangsters listening to a car radio in a windswept mountain lideout, and make grey weather, the texture of trees and the vitality of the figures add up to visual pleasure. An unaffected director of home and bedroom scenes, he even manages, without bathos or leer, to jet away with a shot of Cagney sitting on lis mother...
What makes a man manly or a woman womanly-or vice versa? Many homosexuals are living proof that physical organs alone are not decisive. Freud and his followers argued that the sexual personality was often determined by seemingly trivial incidents in childhood. When the so-called "sexual hormones" (testosterone in men, estradiol in women) were discovered, many physicians decided that hormones must be the agents which determine sexual behavior. In recent years, tens of thousands of effeminate males and masculine females have been given shots of one or the other...
Some things they wanted to know, Congressmen still felt, were not "relatively trivial." Congress' interest was based on a legitimate preoccupation with how more than $1 billion a year was going to be spent by an agency that was in some respects a law unto itself. Congressmen were baffled by a science too abstruse for them to comprehend. They were baffled by the need for national security on the one hand, the obvious necessity for un-hobbled scientific inquiry on the other. Beyond everything else, they were baffled by the problem of fitting absolute Government control of atomic power...