The saying that we are members one of another is not a mere pious formula to be repeated in church without any meaning; it is a literal truth; for though the rich end of the town can avoid living with the poor, it cannot avoid dying with the poor.
For what Don Alfonso sees quite clearly from the start is that the protestations of love by both the men and the women are mere formula, declarations that seem to come from a "school for lovers," as the opera's subtitle puts it.
The above example shows that such reconstructions are more than mere formulas of relationship; they also give some indication of how Proto-Germanic actually sounded.
The plot, after Richard Brinsley Sheridan's "Duenna," itself a parody of comic-opera formula, is a mere wisp: in old Seville, the charming Louisa outwits her blustering father, Don Jerome, to avoid marrying the wealthy fish merchant Mendoza, winning instead her beloved Antonio.
There is no mistaking it for anything else, least of all a staid sedan with the roof removed or a mere update of an old formula.
Journalists "try their best to humanise their tales of woe", he wrote, but this so often became "a mere technique in a numbingly repetitive formula".
A mere chardonnay, perhaps.
