Even the US justice department began an ultimately fruitless inquiry.
It seems a fruitless question, I know.
I was fully expecting countless fruitless inquiries, unanswered emails, and a rising sense of panic as my time abroad loomed threateningly on the horizon, but I couldn't have been more wrong.
Their henchmen even besieged students at the University of Oklahoma, where she had become the first African-American female professor, with fruitless inquiries about whether she was a lesbian.
Frustrated after six months of fruitless inquiries to Chinese officials, American legislators are mounting a public campaign on behalf of a prominent Muslim businesswoman from China's Far West who was jailed on vague charges of revealing state intelligence to foreigners.
After two months of fruitless inquiries, the police closed the investigation last month.
In his eyes, it stands for all the dumb and fruitless inquiries that are set in train by Shakespearean scholars who see the plays as, in essence, studies of character — a hopelessly dry and reductive view, for Knights, who reads each play as one long dramatic poem, welling over with tides of symbolic language.
There was also a fruitless reconstruction of the crime and prolonged inquiries overseas.
By taking time out to engage in this process of self-inquiry, managers will by no means be conducting a fruitless exercise in escapism; rather, they will be getting a better handle on their most elusive, challenging, and essential business problems.
It is a fruitless delusion.
It is a fruitless but enjoyable debate.
