All 9 Uses
trivial
in
Crime and Punishment, by Dostoyevsky
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- But to be stopped on the stairs, to be forced to listen to her trivial, irrelevant gossip, to pestering demands for payment, threats and complaints, and to rack his brains for excuses, to prevaricate, to lie—no, rather than that, he would creep down the stairs like a cat and slip out unseen.†
Chpt 1.1trivial = unimportant
- Why, a stupid thing like this, the most trivial detail might spoil the whole plan.†
Chpt 1.1 *
- "Honoured sir, honoured sir," cried Marmeladov recovering himself—"Oh, sir, perhaps all this seems a laughing matter to you, as it does to others, and perhaps I am only worrying you with the stupidity of all the trivial details of my home life, but it is not a laughing matter to me.†
Chpt 1.2
- This trivial talk in a tavern had an immense influence on him in his later action; as though there had really been in it something preordained, some guiding hint.... ** On returning from the Hay Market he flung himself on the sofa and sat for a whole hour without stirring.†
Chpt 1.6
- Then a man may do nothing but harm to his neighbour in this world, and is prevented from doing the tiniest bit of good by trivial conventional formalities.†
Chpt 4.1
- I believe it's a sort of legal rule, a sort of legal tradition—for all investigating lawyers—to begin their attack from afar, with a trivial, or at least an irrelevant subject, so as to encourage, or rather, to divert the man they are cross-examining, to disarm his caution and then all at once to give him an unexpected knock-down blow with some fatal question.†
Chpt 4.5
- The most awful thought was that he had been actually almost lost, had almost done for himself on account of such a trivial circumstance.†
Chpt 4.6
- And was it worth while, after all that had happened, to contend with these new trivial difficulties?†
Chpt 6.3
- How trivial it all must be, what I am fretting about now!†
Chpt 6.8
Definitions:
-
(1)
(trivial) of little importance -- sometimes more specifically describing a challenge as easy and uninteresting
- (2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)