The phrase "a mere nothing" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to emphasize the insignificance or triviality of something.
Example: "In the grand scheme of things, his complaints were just a mere nothing."
Alternatives: "a trivial matter" or "a insignificant thing".
A person who fills a place, but is of no importance or worth, a nonentity, a "mere nothing".
A Daumier lithograph showing a very fat woman in a crinoline climbing into an omnibus bore no dialogue, but simply the caption, "A mere nothing, and the bus is full".
He is a member of the order in good standing, and it would be a mere nothing for him to wipe the dust with a score of desperadoes or whip a bull elephant with one hand tied behind his back.His adventures in "The Lucky Devil" are therefore remarkable.
He defined a fictitious entity as "a mere nothing" and "no proposition by which any property is ascribed to it can therefore be in itself and of itself a true one, nor therefore an instructive one".
Derham concludes: "For it is a Sign a Man is a wilful, perverse Atheist, that will impute so glorious a Work, as the Creation is, to any Thing, yea, a mere Nothing (as Chance is) rather than to God.
In addition, Louise attempted to champion her late brother-in-law by announcing that she was his confidante and that Beatrice, a mere cipher, meant nothing to him.
It's just a thought, a mere suggestion, nothing more.
The statue would be a mere symbol, nothing else.
Like most folk-wisdom based rules of thumb, of course, the Redskins rule is a mere coincidence: nothing about the way that a bunch of guys throw around pigskin is actually going to impact U.S. presidential elections politics.
Similarly, created things are called 'nothing' because they do not contain in themselves their principles of subsistence (Eriugena is here repeating St. Augustine's view that the creature, considered apart from God, is mere nothing).
You might think that this single concert of Messiaen, part of Lincoln Center's White Light Festival, represented a mere distillation, but nothing about Messiaen is mere.
