nugatory

Examples

• As TV and the Internet converge into something generically known as broadband, the distinctions between the two will soon become nugatory from a consumer point of view.

  The Revolution Will Be Televised

• As soon as the lords were out of Henry's reach, the Scots Estates demanded modifications in the proposed treaty which would have made it nugatory from the English point of view.

  England under the Tudors

• In my opinion, people who opine about the "merely aesthetic," who find aesthetic values "nugatory" unless they are subservient to a higher principle of judgment, manifestly disdain art except as an illustrative aid, a utilitarian convenience.

  Art and Culture

• The "aesthetic canons of legitimacy and achievement," which Helen Vendler observes and attempts to advance, are "nugatory" unless they buttress these cultural pillars.

  Politics and Literature

• I spent yesterday writing the icky sequences of the WIP and the end is in sight for it and I decided that my celebration would be to keep 'nugatory' alive in my vocabulary.

  Even in a little thing

• What scientific evidence there is to support this seems pretty nugatory, but I don't sift flour for pastry, and clearly it isn't necessary when making a quiche.

  Food for Fort: Chelsea buns, grating horseradish and a pastry rebel

• But such was his devotion to duty that he thought little of devoting his holiday to an arduous task that was essentially nugatory.

  A Country of Vast Designs

• As for the flesh of animals that had bona fide died a natural death, the permission to eat it was nugatory, for it was generally eaten by some other animal before man got hold of it; or failing this it was often poisonous, so that practically people were forced to evade the law by some of the means above spoken of, or to become vegetarians.

  Erewhon