Contemporaneity, up-to-dateness, the idea that one is obligated to do something merely because thousands of other people do it, rampages through the novel like a forest fire.
And like this case, the key question was did he do something merely deemed inappropriate by sharing his bed with young boys, or did he take it one step further and molest them?
In her view, disappointment is the appropriate response when one merely relied on someone to do something, but did not trust him or her to do it.
With his soft Irish accent, Keating seemed to be doing something beyond merely reading aloud — without showiness or bluster, he seemed to be sending the story directly into my head.
Of course Komunyakaa is sampling, but he is doing something other than merely exemplifying the fashionable observation that our culture has become a jumble of accumulated references.
Producers may well have wanted to acknowledge the importance of black culture to American life and have thought they were doing something meritorious by merely showing white and black performers together.
But nobody gets fired for merely doing something sub-optimal, especially when that's what everybody else does.
Some have shrugged off the Belichick violation as a minor trespass and suggested that Belichick was merely caught doing something that many teams practice in some form.
If a person's head moves, she may or may not have moved her head, and, if she did move it, she may have actively performed the movement of her head or merely, by doing something else, caused a passive movement.
"If someone does a good thing merely because they're copying others, or they do something bad merely because they're copying others, what credit do they deserve, or what blame do they deserve?" Christakis asks.
Putting the passions outside the scope of reasoned reflection, as merely an ancillary quality of the action — to consider how to do something not merely what we are doing — is to make one kind of decision.
