Dance itself can readily be reduced to a mere step, since after all it is only the act of dancing that is essential.
It's so easy to say, "Yes, I accept your apology," but that could be just a mere step away from saying, "Yes, I accept you".
Judges are increasingly acknowledging that class-action certification, designed to be a mere step in the litigation process, all too often puts defendants under unbearable pressure to settle, even when they have a reasonable chance of winning on merit.
Or there's the capital Geneva, a mere step behind Zurich in the lifestyle stakes, which has a competitive property market and is a global financial hub that demands accommodation for its discerning long-term tenants.
"My cynicism had reached such depths that I regarded those horrors" — the wartime camps, and the killings that came afterward — "as a mere step toward the great, ubiquitous, universal crime, Death, the premise of all our lives," he writes.
His age regarded letter writing as an art on which could be expended the literary care appropriate to the essay or to fiction, and, for Richardson, the creation of epistolary novels entailed a mere step from the actual world into that of the imagination.
