Sentence examples for merely ornamental from inspiring English sources

We also learn that swords of the type Mr. Kariya makes are not merely ornamental weapons.

Others have maintained a merely ornamental presence in politics, voting along factional lines and against their own interests as women.

"The arts have not been merely ornamental, but central to people's struggle to 'find themselves' in a world without clarity, or certainty, or meaning," he wrote.

The aesthetic difference between the two movies isn't merely ornamental or academic; it's the difference between an experience and a mechanism, between a world view and a thesis.

Unfortunately, his presence was merely ornamental since he was nursing a badly-split lip, which had rendered him unable to speak.

That all of his virtuosity and inventiveness are not merely ornamental but, fundamentally, philosophical, in the most specific sense, is the crucial matter.

It can't be simply ornamental.

Instead of producing a style of their own, its architects merely recycled ornamental motifs from earlier periods.

Where the expired patent claimed the features in question, one who seeks to establish trade dress protection must carry the heavy burden of showing that the feature is not functional, for instance by showing that it is merely an ornamental, incidental, or arbitrary aspect of the device.

In all of these structures, different as they are in nearly every other respect, stained glass is seen boldly exploited once again not merely for its local ornamental quality but as a major, integral atmosphere-creating element.

When in September 2012 she was deputed to sell to the public the fable that the Benghazi attack was just an unfortunately vigorous movie review — a response to an Internet video — it could have been that she, rather than Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was given this degrading duty because Rice was merely U.N. ambassador, an ornamental position at an inconsequential institution.