The phrase "a time when merely" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to refer to a specific moment or period in which something was done simply or only in a certain way.
Example: "There was a time when merely asking for help was considered a sign of weakness."
Alternatives: "a period when simply" or "an era when just".
Someday, we may look back on the year 2001 with nostalgia for a time when AIDS was merely a health catastrophe.
Shardlake and the queen go back a long way, to a time when she was merely the widowed Lady Latimer and Shardlake entertained vain hopes that she might overlook his hump if he offered his hand (in the manner of all great detectives, Shardlake's vast intellect and emotional insecurity mean he doesn't have much luck with women).
Once upon a time, when I was merely a 16-year-old suburban girl dying for rebellion, Vancouver's downtown Granville Street was a cool place to go.
A time when I was merely starting out as an international air hostess, unaware of what my life was about to become: G-A-Y!
What on earth did young people talk about in a time when songs were merely ideas on paper until a band brought them to life, each rendition forgotten as soon as it ended?
There are times when merely occupying the office of prime minister sets holders of the position apart and invests them with authority when they need it most.
But courage is often demonstrated, because it is often needed, in greater quantities, in daily life; and there are even times when "merely to live", as Seneca said in his letter to Lucilius, "is itself an act of courage".
Its distance means astronomers are seeing it blazing away at a time when the universe was merely 770 million years old, a team reports online today in Nature.
Next, we compare the accuracy of the different inference methods, again, taken two at a time, when gaps are treated not merely as missing data but as information that is included in the phylogenetic analysis.
