Ideals by their very nature should not merely reinforce ordinary practices and expectations.
I sensed my parents' disappointment in the way they glanced at each other when I spoke about a book, and I knew that what I had said was not incorrect but merely ordinary, uncharged with their brand of originality.
But he did not merely appeal to ordinary language in order to undermine philosophical distinctions, he did it also in a constructive way.
New York sirloin steak is merely ordinary (not that you should go to a Turkish restaurant for steak), and the mixed grill, with a choice of two, three or four meats, can be uneven, probably because the meats have different cooking times and tend to dry out.
Tipped by Zane Lowe and the NME, and about to release their debut album, they're purveyors of a vigorous but very traditional brand of indie that should seem refreshing in a scene now depleted of straightforward guitar bands, but doesn't rise above the merely ordinary.
And yet the sense of liberation, tentative and uneasy but real, that many experienced when American troops entered Baghdad and, later, arrested Saddam has increasingly given way beneath the dispiriting weight of occupation, not merely among insurgents but among ordinary people.
Here the unnecessary prefix is part of the joke – the idea is that a composer of merely ordinary sensitivity would not mind at all hearing his work murdered by a juvenile.
Hard to beat, even if the food were merely ordinary, which it wasn't.
Both are not merely wines, but indications of how much better ordinary sherries could be with more attention to the vineyard side of things.
By cancelling out the ordinary neatness of narrative explanation, Shakespeare does not merely mystify his people, as the Mona Lisa is made mysterious by the occluding fog of her sfumato; he humanizes them.
