Word: trivialized
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Talk about the coeducation that is coming degenerates quickly into questions which are now unanswerable. It is hard to distinguish the trivial from the substantive objection, hard even to be sure whether coeducational living will have a major or negligible impact on undergraduates. Many of the reservations reduce to cold assertions of male Harvard's self-interest. One Faculty member compares the merger rather coarsely to "a rich man marrying a poor girl--he had better be pretty sure that he's getting some spiritual benefits before he goes through with it." That spirit has been well hidden...
Anyone who has spent time in a U.S. hospital recently knows part of the problem. The astounding increase in the cost of hospital care shows no sign of slowing down, and it makes the much bewailed "rise in the cost of living" look trivial by comparison. While the cost of staying alive in America has jumped some 21 per cent since 1960, the cost of staying alive in a hospital has zoomed up by nearly 125 per cent. Drugs an physician's services haven't quite kept pace, but they have both risen by about 45 per cent...
...fact, the most important change which the committee recommended--creation of a central administrator charged with community affairs--is one that may appear trivial to most observers. Yet the committee was all too right when it wrote...
...reason, says Goffman, is that he offends the hidden code of behavior to which all "normal" people subscribe. The man oblivious to the rain is guilty not just of a trivial impropriety, but of the greater sin of social unpredictability. No one can guess with any assurance what ceremony he will next profane. No one can be sure of his respect of public order, without which society would regress to the jungle. Goffman is still exploring the patterns of behavior at social gatherings, which he believes have all the systematic qualities of a language. He is also at work...
...that has until now been both neglected and misunderstood. "The individual is known by the social bonds that hold him," writes Goffman in Behavior in Public Places. "And through these bonds he is held to something that is a social entity with a life substance of its own." However trivial social exchange may seem at the levels Goffman examines, "it is out of these unpromising materials that the gossamer reality of social occasions is built. We find that our little inhibitions are carefully tied into a network, that the waste products of our serious activities are worked into a pattern...