Perhaps it was the defamiliarising effect of Kurosawa's film which, for me, opened up the meaning of Lear: a kind of human arrogance and self-importance which, in the face of mortality, needs to believe the world will be a divided and diminished thing when we are gone.
"It's kind of a diminishing returns thing," Redding said of reinventing the chains.
Any utilitarian argument for art will succeed only in diminishing the thing it's arguing for.
Thus, when we find the pleasure derived from a thing diminishing, we move on to the next thing or event and almost certainly make another error of prediction, and then another, ad infinitum.
A sense of humour, in Hrabal, is really a sense of proportion: the ability to diminish the things of this world to their true size.
He said that Remi had "a lot of ideas about how to keep the good stuff we'd established in Season 1", and "diminish the things that weren't as strong".
Nor have they left due to decreases in travel funds and diminishing support for things they care about, from graduate fellowships to libraries to K-12 outreach programs they had seen as providing another kind of important venue for connecting with publics beyond the university.
Is it necessary to point out that there's such a thing as diminishing marginal returns?
"It's an overarching thing, a diminishing trust," said Rüdiger Noll, director of the Brussels-based Church and SocietheConference of thEuropeanenChurchesropean Churches, an interdenominational group.
The danger is that it becomes a metaphor for the whole economy: many fear that the muddle-through approach of the past two decades of boom has diminishing returns.One dam thing after anotherIt wasn't always all about coal.
