Word: worthlessness
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...Barzun insists, the mystery story is in trouble. His explanation: the detective story is a "parasite" of the novel, and when the serious novel itself "concentrates on the whacky," as it does today, and "starts from the conviction that society and all who dwell in it are disagreeable and worthless," the detective story is simply thrown off its feed. Good detective fiction needs "a world that we accept because it is conventional . . . Why pursue the criminal if the victim and society are not worth protecting...
...Called "worthless" by one of the group, the bi-weekly dinner meetings are also severely criticized. At these meetings, the group "degenerates into a kind of gentleman's club, a mutual admiration society." He says that there is "little intellectual meeting ground between the various academic disciplines," and that the criticisms of the readings are therefore not very helpful. This statement is the direct antithesis of Dean Devane's comment, "I suspect that the criticism from the fellow student is even more worthwhile than that from his elders...
...study in disillusionment, the play tells how republican Lorenzo de Medici, by playing the weakling and pimp, has the chance to kill the debauched, despotic Duke of Florence, only to find that the new Duke is as worthless as the old. In a role that is superficially as neurotic and high-souled and weak, and is as full of dissembling and soliloquy, as Hamlet's, Gerard Philipe played with great effect. If possibly overstressed, Lorenzaccio's effeteness stood in vivid contrast to Philippe Noiret's gruffly selfish Duke. Such performances were part of a simple but eloquent...
...with the help of ever-solicitous Carlotta, O'Neill sat up, grasped a sheaf of papers in his palsied hands and thrust it to the flames. No telling what was in the five plays so carefully dispatched by the man who made them; O'Neill considered the stuff worthless. He certainly fixed the scholars probing his socioneuro-anthropologic motives that...
...discovery was made by detective work added to heavy digging. After spending part of the summer excavating the conspicuous ruins of a temple of Artemis, the diggers got down to the river bed without finding anything Lydian. In other promising spots they found only worthless Roman or Christian remains, and a few Lydian potsherds. But when they attacked the foundations of a large Roman-Byzantine structure called "Building B," they found a promising clue: a great marble block with an inscription telling that the Roman Emperor Lucius Verus (A.D. 130-169) had passed that way and given...