But ultimately Mr. Agazzi settles for frothy, somewhat cloying charm rather than daring more consequential meanings and emotions.
If the reading passages on each test were culled from each grade's specific curricular content in literature, science, history, geography and the arts, the tests would exhibit what researchers call "consequential validity" — meaning that the tests would actually help improve education.
It's just that the link between beards and any real meaning, any consequential tendency, has almost always been so fickle and tenuous and arbitrary.
Whether or not Aaron Swartz suffered because of the manipulation of the public discourse surrounding hacking, his case is a reminder that it is important that we be attuned to attempts to change the meanings of words in consequential ways.
Lost in all the anxiety and hand-wringing over revelations about big data, personal privacy and the National Security Agency is another unfortunate, and consequential, societal development: A transformation in the meaning of "meta".
At times it seemed to be the constitutional equivalent of trench warfare, with long minutes spent dissecting the exact meaning of words like "concurrently" "consequential" and "incidental" in the context of legislation in some cases going back decades.
Flaux said he had been asked to decide two issues, whether losses claimed arose out of damage cause by "persons riotously and tumultuously assembled" within the meaning of the legislation and whether "consequential losses", including loss of profit or rent were "in principle recoverable".
He wanted his words to have meaning, which meant that interviews had to be consequential.
