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fatuous
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  • On those walks we talked about Tradd and Commerce, God, and politics, as well as the silliest, most fatuous, most inconsequential things.†   (source)
  • A fatuous lie; at her age there are no crises left in marriage, only acceptance and extraction.†   (source)
  • Would you ever allow a book of evolutionary psychology applied to art not to be entirely fatuous?†   (source)
  • "Yes, ma'am," the specialist said, smiling fatuously.†   (source)
  • And in fatuous recollection a Galician peasants' saying came back to her: I am crawling into his ear.†   (source)
  • RADIO MAN (Low, with dramatic intensity) Ladies and gentlemen, this is Harry Esterbrook, speaking to you from the courthouse in Hillsboro, where the jury is just returning to the courtroom to render its verdict in the fatuous Hillsboro Monkey Trial case.†   (source)
  • Instead, I composed an essay on peace so fatuous that it might have done credit to a professional editorial writer: "Tonight, it's almost like a miracle to think that nowhere on the entire earth is there one single, insignificant little war being fought.†   (source)
  • He lived outside time, indifferent to the wisdom of age or the rights of station, indifferent even to that studied and fatuous indifference of people like Miss Bunce, the probation officer, whose every gesture was a parody of people like Hodge.†   (source)
  • To claim to 'respect' and even to 'love' the great mass with their yaps at one end and smelly feet at the other requires the fatuous, uncritical, saccharine, blind, sentimental slobbishness found in some nursery supervisors, most spaniel dogs, and all missionaries.†   (source)
  • Then he turned his own rather fatuous face to the company.   (source)
  • The blogger is not wholly fatuous.   (source)
  • As she walked about the yellowing hillsides or worked at easy tasks, her lips were curled in a perpetual fatuous smile.   (source)
    fatuous = without intelligence
  • A motivational lecturer from RejoovTV, some fatuous drone in a suit.†   (source)
  • Who was fooled by that fatuous legalism?†   (source)
  • The messages I wrote on them were fatuous.†   (source)
  • He would sit at my knee, gazing up, fatuous and adoring and empty.†   (source)
  • Which was the truth, in a way, as he'd come to see his job as a challenge: how outrageous could he get, in the realm of fatuous neologism, and still achieve praise?†   (source)
  • McCandless conveniently overlooked the fact that London himself had spent just a single winter in the North and that he'd died by his own hand on his California estate at the age of forty, a fatuous drunk, obese and pathetic, maintaining a sedentary existence that bore scant resemblance to the ideals he espoused in print.†   (source)
  • Apart from your obscene brutality, mon general, you are a fatuous, hollow bore, a cruel joke on your people!†   (source)
  • Buckheath glanced angrily and contemptuously into the stupid, fatuous countenance above him; he appeared to curb with some difficulty the disposition to retort in kind.†   (source)
  • 'They reflect the age in cynicism which cannot comprehend the death of possibilities, fatuous sophisticated indulgence in the parody of the miraculous, decadence whose last refuge is self-ridicule, a mannered helplessness.†   (source)
  • "Dinner—" she began fatuously.†   (source)
  • I don't know exactly what he thought of me—doubtless the snotty, free-wheeling style of my manuscript reports had something to do with his negative reaction—but I thought him cold, remote, humorless, with the swollen ego and unapproachable manner of a man who has fatuously overvalued his own accomplishments.†   (source)
  • I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow.†   (source)
  • She welcomed the news that Ashley now had a home of his own, so she could remove herself from uncongenial surroundings and also from the distressing sight of her sister so fatuously happy with a man unworthy of her.†   (source)
  • The irritating thing was that in the racket of voices Winston could hardly hear what Parsons was saying, and was constantly having to ask for some fatuous remark to be repeated.†   (source)
  • He told me and, on the instant, it was as though someone had switched off the wireless, and a voice that had been bawling in my ears, incessantly, fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short; an immense silence followed, empty at first, but gradually, as my outraged sense regained authority, full of a multitude of sweet and natural and long forgotten sounds: for he had spoken a name that was so familiar to me, a conjuror's name of such ancient power, that, at its…†   (source)
  • He did not even have to be told in words that he had surely found the lost Lucas Burch; it seemed to him now that only crassest fatuousness and imbecility should have kept unaware.†   (source)
  • Her expression of duplicity was balanced by the fatuous confidence with which the Unicorn regarded her.†   (source)
  • Connie Rivers lifted the high tail-gate out of the truck and got down and helped Rose of Sharon to the ground; and she accepted it nobly, smiling her wise, self-satisfied smile, mouth tipped at the corners a little fatuously.†   (source)
  • Don't be silly," I said, for the language of all our nights in the roadster and in the porch swing suddenly seemed, in the glare of morning and with the desperation in me, fatuous and loathsome.†   (source)
  • …still crashing soundlessly in the duskfilled study, he watches quietly the puny, unhorsed figure moving with that precarious and meretricious cleverness of animals balanced on their hinder legs; that cleverness of which the man animal is so fatuously proud and which constantly betrays him by means of natural laws like gravity and ice, and by the very extraneous objects which he has himself invented, like motor cars and furniture in the dark, and the very refuse of his own eating left…†   (source)
  • "Don't you like the poor lonely bachelor?" he yammered in a fatuous way.†   (source)
  • He was as devoted as it was possible to be without appearing fatuous.†   (source)
  • "Of course, you will dispute the will," she remarked, fatuously, to Catherine.†   (source)
  • I don't want to be fatuous, but I think it is very possible."†   (source)
  • Of course that seems to you too fatuous.†   (source)
  • Hans Castorp, as we have said, took note of them in his kindhearted way and he opened himself to them as a way of testing them—from which it became particularly clear that the waking Hans Castorp was a very different person from the fatuously dreaming Hans Castorp, who had called Settembrini an "organ-grinder" to his face and tried with all his might to push him out of the way because he was "bothering" him.†   (source)
  • He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror.†   (source)
  • This was more exciting, the inner images it evoked more definite, and the singers' expressions became fatuous and languid.†   (source)
  • Several other women also chimed in, with an animus which none of them would have been so fatuous as to show but for the rollicking evening they had passed.†   (source)
  • …Illusions of reality represented in this fatuous comedy of life that never ends, nor can ever end!†   (source)
  • "Let me only get there," he had said with the fatuousness of Crusoe over his big boat, "and the rest is but a matter of time and energy."†   (source)
  • Swann made no attempt, however, to modify this conception of fashion; feeling that his own came no nearer to the truth, was just as fatuous, devoid of all importance, he saw no advantage to be gained by imparting it to his mistress, with the result that, after a few months, she ceased to take any interest in the people to whose houses he went, except when they were the means of his obtaining tickets for the paddock at race-meetings or first-nights at the theatre.†   (source)
  • He went briskly around the block with the fatuousness of one of Tarkington's adolescents, hurrying at the blind places lest he miss Rosemary's coming out of the studio.†   (source)
  • But the Popular Daughter becomes engaged every six months between sixteen and twenty-two, when she arranges a match with young Hambell, of Cambell & Hambell, who fatuously considers himself her first love, and between engagements the P. D. (she is selected by the cut-in system at dances, which favors the survival of the fittest) has other sentimental last kisses in the moonlight, or the firelight, or the outer darkness.†   (source)
  • She divined that all the pride, blue blood, wealth, culture, distinction, all the impersonal condescending persuasion, all the fatuous philanthropy on earth would not avail to turn this man a single hair's-breadth from his downward career to destruction.†   (source)
  • With fatuous beaming he described a night at Barney's; without any success whatever he tried to be funny; and when Madeline lectured him on the evils of liquor and the evils of association with immoral persons, he was for once relieved.†   (source)
  • Only as the local train shambled into the low-forested clayland of Westmoreland County, did he feel once more identified with his surroundings; at the station he saw a star he knew, and a cold moon bright over Chesapeake Bay; he heard the rasping wheels of buckboards turning, the lovely fatuous voices, the sound of sluggish primeval rivers flowing softly under soft Indian names.†   (source)
  • Our thoughts were frosty mist along the eaves; our two ghosts kissed, high on the long, mazed wires—eerie half-laughter echoes here and leaves only a fatuous sigh for young desires; regret has followed after things she loved, leaving the great husk.†   (source)
  • Vida had done her a service; had made all agonizing seem so fatuous that she ceased writhing and saw that her whole problem was simple as mutton: she was interested in Erik's aspiration; interest gave her a hesitating fondness for him; and the future would take care of the event….†   (source)
  • …herself approached, some evil spirit would urge me to attempt to make her angry, and I would avail myself of the slightest pretext to say to her that I regretted my aunt's death because she had been a good woman in spite of her absurdities, but not in the least because she was my aunt; that she might easily have been my aunt and yet have been so odious that her death would not have caused me a moment's sorrow; statements which, in a book, would have struck me as merely fatuous.†   (source)
  • They came to the market, a hundred stalls under a long corrugatediron roof, with stone pillars bearing the fatuous names of the commissioners who had built it—by voting bonds for the building.†   (source)
  • They talked, tremendously, and he listened with fatuous enthusiasm to opinions which, had Leora produced them, he would have greeted with "That's a damn' silly remark!"†   (source)
  • I noticed both with these pretty girls and with everybody else we met, that in default of serious news, such as we had heard at Maple-Durham, they were eager to discuss all the little details of life: the weather, the hay-crop, the last new house, the plenty or lack of such and such birds, and so on; and they talked of these things not in a fatuous and conventional way, but as taking, I say, real interest in them.†   (source)
  • She was one of the small ones of the earth; she had not been born to honours; she knew the world too well to nourish fatuous illusions on the article of her own place in it.†   (source)
  • Italy, all the same, had spoiled a great many people; he was even fatuous enough to believe at times that he himself might have been a better man if he had spent less of his life there.†   (source)
  • In all ages, indeed, grammarians appear to have been fatuous.†   (source)
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