How to Use fatuous in a Sentence

fatuous

adjective
  • Harris stands tall and proud, in all his fatuous glory.
    Malcolm Gladwell, Washington Post, 18 Aug. 2023
  • Molière is not our contemporary in some facile and fatuous way.
    Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 1 Feb. 2022
  • Bush in order to scare people with his fatuous Hitler analogy, and the peace camp in order to scare people with the prospect of heavy losses.
    Christian Lorentzen, Harper’s Magazine , 20 July 2022
  • Gotti’s lawyer labored hard to make something of the fatuous hypocrisy that secured the government’s case.
    Howard Blum, The Hive, 1 Dec. 2017
  • Co-starring Chris Tucker, as the soldiers’ agent, and Steve Martin, as a fatuous tycoon.
    Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 10 Jan. 2017
  • His play, which might have been smashed by the insensitive or botched by the fatuous, has fallen into expert hands.
    Claudia Cassidy, Chicago Tribune, 19 May 2022
  • Weil neatly disarmed this fatuous attempt to portray him as an academic with his head in the clouds.
    Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 20 July 2021
  • Why not the antics of sly Elizabethan housewives playing tricks on a fatuous drunken roue?
    Peter Marks, Washington Post, 22 Jan. 2020
  • But Daumier always finds some element of the ridiculous, the fatuous, the smug, even in the poets, writers and critics among his subjects.
    Washington Post, 7 Oct. 2020
  • Even the urban myth that billions of dollars of big-city transit subsidies are needed to help the poor and minorities is fatuous.
    Stephen Moore, Washington Examiner, 27 Feb. 2020
  • Schwentke’s attempt to create a parable of the decline of the American empire seems mainly forced and fatuous.
    Stephen Farber, The Hollywood Reporter, 20 Feb. 2023
  • Yet, it was followed, as his bloopers always are, by even more fatuous defamations aimed at the president from his critics.
    Carl M. Cannon, Orange County Register, 26 Feb. 2017
  • He’s expected to rule any day now on a fatuous lawsuit brought by antiabortion activists.
    Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 6 Mar. 2023
  • The choice for Howland thus becomes one between the vulnerability of the inmate and the brusque, fatuous bullying of the keeper.
    Katy Waldman, The New Yorker, 5 Jan. 2021
  • Power doesn’t have to corrupt, the film suggests; many come to it precorrupted, as well as ignorant, fatuous and heedless.
    Joe Morgenstern, WSJ, 8 Mar. 2018
  • This attitude need not be a fatuous hiding in the sand, denying realities.
    Aimee Levitt, Chicago Reader, 29 June 2017
  • The Old Sincerity pointed out everything fatuous the boss said.
    Peter W. Kaplan and Peter Stevenson, Esquire, 4 Apr. 2014
  • In other words, McConnell is just engaging in fatuous blather.
    Los Angeles Times, 23 Apr. 2020
  • Webcams, those seeing-eye gadgets that plug into PCs, are almost as numerous as fatuous dot-com TV ads.
    Gareth Branwyn, WIRED, 1 Apr. 2000
  • Lost in an endless game of IP-reshuffling musical chairs, Barry realizes, possibly too late, the futility of dwelling on the past — a fatuous lesson from a movie that can’t stop doing the same.
    Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times, 15 June 2023
  • Voters should be infuriated — and terrified —that politicians with this fatuous take on how to fight the virus, much less how to manage our economy, might end up in charge of our government.
    Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 10 Aug. 2021
  • As translated by the director and screenwriter Billy Ray, this is instead a slo-mo horror story, in which the worst lack all inhibition while the best are full of fatuous integrity.
    James Poniewozik, New York Times, 24 Sep. 2020
  • Principle aside, O’Dea’s stance toward Trump and refusal to embrace his fatuous election claims made good political sense.
    Los Angeles Times, 13 Nov. 2022
  • One of many regrettable features of the Donald Trump era is the way that the president's lies and conspiracy theories have seemed to vindicate some of his opponents' most fatuous slogans.
    Star Tribune, 21 Dec. 2020
  • There, the Department of Justice has chosen to declare much of the act unconstitutional, on flagrantly fatuous grounds.
    Michael Hiltzik, latimes.com, 9 July 2018
  • Drawing that line means finally rejecting the fatuous framing of gun rights under the Second Amendment urged by hard-line adherents: Our freedoms are unbounded.
    Olivia Li, Slate Magazine, 17 Oct. 2017
  • After it was furiously indicted by Democrats on the fatuous charge that its facilitation of Russian meddling handed Donald Trump the 2016 election, the company went out of its way to atone.
    Gerard Baker, WSJ, 26 July 2021
  • This was always a fatuous issue, but since Trump was pushing it relentlessly the press went along, even though there was much more evidence that Trump was the one whose behavior threatened national security.
    Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 11 Sep. 2023
  • Un chant d’amour, a film the Moonlight generation knows nothing about but that Meise relates to for its individual morality — a lost idea in this era of fatuous political conformity.
    Armond White, National Review, 11 Mar. 2022
  • Where the script and the production excel are in the scenes in Stephen’s office, where Rachel responds with understandable exasperation to her therapist’s seemingly fatuous questions and suggestions.
    Ben Brantley, New York Times, 6 June 2017

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'fatuous.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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