And what does 'merely' mean in this context?
I'm not very interested, finally, in haphazard revelations, attenuated characters, stories where method or technique is all -- stories, in short, where nothing much happens, or where what does happen merely confirms one's sour view of a world gone out of control".
Mr This thinks of himself as a debunker of culinary myths, yet much of what he does merely retraces in the laboratory steps that chefs have taken in the kitchen for years.
"Heaven Knows What" doesn't merely expand — as all good works of fiction do — the realm of experience.
"Heaven Knows What" doesn't merely expand as all good works of fiction do the realm of experience.
To be against jailing people for such offences is not to condone what they do, merely to apply some sense of proportion.
Wasn't what Val did merely an unnecessary provocation and an attack against a weak and oppressed minority?
Lawyers fume that it is not just too many laws and too few courts that tangle justice, but clueless judges and incompetent clerks.What do you know?It is not merely a question of literacy.
Even the mid-17th century English Puritans had trouble in making adultery a capital crime, and the last execution in the UK, sometime in the mid-1650s, involvedefiningng what the unfortunate adulterer had done merely as a felony.
The philosopher Immanuel Kant had reached much the same conclusion in 1790 without having gone to sea: "To call the ocean sublime we must regard it as poets do, merely by what strikes the eye; if it is at rest, as a clear mirror of water only bounded by the heaven; if it is restless, as an abyss threatening to overwhelm everything".
When he meets strangers and they ask what he does, he merely says he is in the marine industry.
