Just as the Wizard of Oz turned out to be a man behind a curtain, so Supermarionation merely combined the words "super", "marionette" and "animation".
Between 2000 and 2005, Pfizer's laboratories created only a handful of new drugs, leaving the company dependent on dubious innovations like Caduet, a heart drug introduced in 2004 that Pfizer promoted as an important advance even though it merely combined two older medicines.
We do not know whether there was already variation in appearance, such as enlarged hypocotyls, leaves that form heads, multi tillering types etc. prior to domestication, or whether (more likely) there was a common wild type, and that breeders merely combined mutations and allelic variation by crossing which gave rise to diverse morphotypes.
The crowd's love-hate relationship with Johnson was good for the box office, and his brawling and abusive manner, combined with white vitriol, merely added to the high-risk entertainment.
Similarly, distinct genetic risk factors may provide multiplicative, rather than merely additive, combined risk because of their compound molecular consequences.
Frege was here influenced by Kant's discussion of judgment, and the ancient observation that merely combining two things does not make the combination truth-evaluable.
So a grad student's account of grad school might not be truly representative of what went on; it might merely combine the best (or worst) with how it all turned out.
Suddenly, it seems charming that the Justice Department was so upset with Microsoft for merely combining a personal computer operating system (exhibit A, Windows) with a piece of software known as a Web browser (exhibit B, Internet Explorer).
Occasionally, Medawar slips in some Olympian glibness of his own: "science and imaginative writing are utterly incongruous, in English anyway … and the effect of combining them is merely absurd".
"The End of Days" seems, at first, as if it merely combines two familiar elements: the protagonist who lives through most of the twentieth century, and whose experiences record the passage of history's cargo; and the counterfactual novel that explores hypothetical possibilities — all the lives that a protagonist might have had, if different roads had been taken.
