They protected themselves from what we were going through by limiting themselves to the manageable domain of vacuous, hackneyed language.
Nice, if vacuous, words were spoken all round.
Through a particularly vacuous style of body language, Polonius (Dan Hiatt) is revealed to be as much an ass-kissing, shallow courtier as an empty-headed fool who would pimp out his own daughter for political favor.
For languages that do not allow vacuous quantification, clause (ii) can in each case be omitted.
Clever language without real answers is a vacuous power play, and poisonous to real political change.
For now, though, you could argue that the events of 9/11 still seem so unfathomable that they have actually impoverished the language a little, leaving us with a vacuous phrase like war on terror, which manages to empty both "war" and "terror" of much their meaning, or the creepy, Nazi-sounding homeland, which seems a far less pleasant place to live than just plain America.
Where the visual representation of historical events is now often seen only as vacuous jpeg files amid gigabytes of information, Ms. Mehretu's language of abstraction is singular and poetic.
Thus, the language of advertising consists essentially of often propositionally vacuous displays of competitive linguistic sophistication designed to create a largely artificial sense of exclusiveness among status-conscious readers.
In other words, (T) contains as much vacuous information as (P) contains relevant information.
Kate Tempest – Everybody Down What we said: "Tempest shines, though, through her use of language, which illuminates the subject matter – from boardroom drug deals to vacuous parties where "everybody … has got a hyphenated second name" – to dazzling effect".
