First, if factory labor has morally objectionable features, this cannot be so merely because it assigns to the capitalist the surplus value of the laborer.
This is shown to be so not merely through the deluded consciousness of George, but in the sane and watchful perspective of his old friend, Johnnie, who sees through the woman immediately: "This girl wore her attractiveness not as a girl should, simply, consciously, as a happy crown of pleasure, but rather as a murderous utensil with which she might wound indiscriminately right and left".
This essay's scant six pages are so bracing, merely reading them makes you feel a little neater around the middle.
"It it was so exciting, we were energized and merely working from a mattress on the floor".
In a genre as misogynistic as hip-hop, where women are so often merely sex objects, Drake raps and sings about liking his women "book- and street-smart".
At the top, the superrich are finding that there are so many "merely rich" people that they have to find new ways to distinguish themselves.
Langer, perhaps accepting that anything goes when the stakes are so high, merely shrugged and opined that his opponent's good fortune was "pretty strange".
Hang on — it might not be so spiritual, but merely conjugal.
The Grail that I remember from Malory was never so merely instrumental; its purity was unassailable.
I don't know why he doesn't put the issue in positive terms — an argument that people crave positive reinforcement from friends and strangers for their life choices, from the grandest to the most minor, might be more cogent (even if, of course, this has always been so, and social media merely magnify and preserve the infinitesimal signs of social approval that most people have always craved).
In reality it had been both at the same time – and, indeed, had always been so – it was merely a question of degree.
