But what they were reading, in the guise of a love story with special effects, was something deeper: nothing less than a foundational narrative of modern Western culture.
Remember that in 2011 (and again in 2012), House Republicans nearly unanimously approved Paul Ryan's budget, which has more or less become the foundational expression of the Republican view of government.
No less than a foundational pillar of the post-Cold War order is up for debate, and it will take much more than one positive meeting with the Japanese premier to undo the months of statements and policy proposals lobbed at Washington's most reliable friends.
In the philanthropy realm, girls have been on the receiving end of less than 7.5percentt of all foundational giving in the past 15 years, with fewer than 8 cents out of every philanthropic dollar going toward providing girls with leadership development opportunities.
It is far less grand in size than the foundational documents of the United States; it can almost be missed, encased atop a pedestal in front of a fireplace in the imposing library whose walls J. P. Morgan covered with inlaid walnut bookshelves, a 16th-century tapestry and allegorical paintings paying homage to the arts and sciences.
Instead of creating a "foundation of fairness," the federal minimum wage has kept generations of young adults and other less-experienced jobseekers from acquiring the foundational skills needed to advance in the workforce.
A different way to develop a non-mentalist foundational theory of meaning focuses less on relations between subsentential expressions or sentences and bits of non-linguistic reality and more on the regularities which govern our use of language.
Often, great works of literature also reflect philosophical systems of thinking, and reading such works can be a much less threatening prospect than tackling the dry foundational books.
Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who took particular offense at the charges of insignificance, argued that this was a debate about nothing less than "the glue that holds the basic foundational societal unit together".
Cases of this nature have of course been familiar for some time, but perhaps it has been less on the radar that the uniqueness proposal creates foundational problems for language acquisition theory.
