How To Use Futile In A Sentence

But more needs to be done with stories like this particular one, if you want to see your hard work come to fruition in ousting George W. Bush from the White House, along with any other of his cronies who have blood on their hands, from George W. Bushâ€ ™ s futile â€˜War On Terrorâ€ ™. Think Progress » 60 Minutes: CIA Official Reveals Bush, Cheney, Rice Were Personally Told Iraq Had No WMD in Fall 2002
A rumor is floating about that the businessman is getting ready to waste millions again in a futile attempt to become governor, but that's relevant only to the coyotes who will take his money.
A spokesman for the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party called the cabinet shuffle "a futile exercise which inspires none and in no way dispels the gloom shadowing" Mr. Singh's government, according to Press Trust of India. India Fires Environment Minister Who Held Up Projects
Internet use in China has quadrupled since 2000 and ultimately censorship may prove futile.
So looking at whether something makes people happy is largely futile. In statisticians' terms, you are looking for variance in something that is invariant.

We do need to finally lay the dead to rest, to accept that mistakes were made that cannot be unmade, and to accept that the ‘blame game’ at this point in our history would be a futile exercise.
The tactic will prove as futile now as it did before. Times, Sunday Times
Signs of bloat are stomach pain and futile attempts to vomit and to salivate.
We spend billions each year in futile attempts to prevent floodplains from flooding, barrier islands from migrating, chaparral from burning, and predators from predation.
Any company that advertises itself as ‘fun’ is simply making a desperate and futile attempt to distract attention away from the soul-destroying mundanity that is the reality of its day-to-day life.
The noise was quite deafening, and my attempt to block all these unwanted sounds by avoiding the vision was almost completely futile.
But as far as gaining consciousness and sentience, it is futile.
Compared with the towns of the north, Rheims is relatively unharmed; but for that very reason the arrest of life seems the more futile and cruel. Fighting France
They did not want to listen, those men who waited futilely by the gyrocar which had witnessed the invulnerability of the Wabbly to all attack. Morale A Story of the War of 1941-43
She fought the futile urge to draw breath.
While likely futile, the effort to stop showrooming is an understandable if sometimes unsubtle reaction to fears of death by a billion clicks.
I remember watching television images of the tsunami hitting Japan and wiping out everything in its path; I remember thinking, "It's all futile, all our worries and strivings -- and nature just wipes it out in seconds. Wes Isley: Natural Disasters: God's Anger, The End Times Or Just Reality?
But at his best he was also capable of delivering among the most clinical yorkers in the game, the ball arrowing in toward the batsman's toes, often leaving them sprawled on the floor as they jabbed their bat futilely at the ground as the stumps cartwheeled behind them. The Paradox of Shoaib Akhtar
I am sorry that I missed my chance this evening to register my protest, futile though it would have been.
And it is a futile exercise for those overseeing markets to say that no one should use soft dollars.
A number of women were quite bitter about their futile attempts to get clergy to help.
I was (but am no longer since it seemed just futile) chatting in one forum and suggested to some of the people there that instead of just repeating their (imho recycled and contextless) arguments against AGW in discussion forums, they should actually refocus a bit and try to publish their findings if they really have something new to add to the scientific debate. Advanced Trolling 101
I looked up to find Trischen staring at me, his eyes tearing from the laughter he was futilely trying to keeping in.
He brought his arm up in a futile attempt to ward off the blow.
For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.
It was, instead, a futile and costly detour in making the transition from a feudalistic system to a market economy.
Other shots revealed the futile efforts of firefighters as they built fireguards or dropped plane-loads of water and fire retardant on a natural force out of control.
There was a time when the man could crack a joke, though there was never anything he found funnier than man's futile quest for meaning in a hopeless, senseless world.
Last Tuesday, I engaged in the civic-minded and (for a Republican) futile act of voting in the Illinois Fifth Congressional District primary. Illinois Politics
Thus Dillard echoes Carlyle's sentiments that vaticination, or the act of prophesying, is a futile means of understanding the world.
In fact, ANY group of people I have ever encountered has so much diversity that it really is futile to "prejudge" any one person. Can Democracy and Muslim Sharia Law Live Together?
How futile is it to bash one party with the other? Matthew Yglesias » Steve Austria (R-OH) Doesn’t Know When the Depression Happened
Night after night they argued patiently in futile attempts to make him see the error of his ways. Molly Keane's Ireland
Why engage in artistic efforts at all if they are essentially futile and self-defeating and devoid of truth?
If we see life as futile, we'll have a good laugh about it. Times, Sunday Times
Political leaders are confronted suddenly with a new set of conditions that makes continued resistance futile.
We've heard that he lost because he futilely accused Barack Obama of associated with terrorists or because he didn't devote enough time and energy to attacking Obama's questionable associates.
Bitter experience has taught me that resistance is futile, so it was with a heavy heart that I left my so-called home and got behind the wheel of what Brenda laughingly refers to as my ‘car’.
However, attempting to retaliate is either futile or dangerous ethically due to c. Identify « BuzzMachine
Attempts to get supplies to the region are futile because troops will not allow the aid convoy to enter the city.
In keeping with the general entropic tendency of the universe, all my futile efforts at gathering and retaining, my naïve tendency toward nest-egging, fly directly in the face of the entire universe itself!
Worrying over the results after the exam is a futile exercise as you cannot alter the result.
As I sat there so obviously jacketless and possessionless, it was clear that communication with these clowns was futile. Archive 2008-11-01
While most techs are just happy if you don't toss the mic around like Roger Daltry, they're notorious for their futile attempts at keeping bands from exceeding pre-determined stage volume levels.
They were howling at the very gates, and sometimes he and the Factor paused from the game to listen and laugh at the futile efforts of the wolves to get in. The Hunger Cry
All attempts to coax him to play with educational toys proved painful and futile.
It is futile to demand motivation from the Vice, or reasons for his actions, for the point about evil is that it is absurd, unmotivated, and inconsistent.
I have seen a learned work about a century old, now entirely forgotten, in which it is maintained that Virgil's fourth Eclogue is simply a genethliacon of Augustus; the arguments, which are ingenious but futile, are drawn from the poem of The Religious Experience of the Roman People From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus
In the indeterminate fluxations of a cosmos in which ‘things happen’ and it is futile to ask about whence or wherefore, he accepted responsibility for nothing except the poem he aspired to be.
During his first year in college, Ma made a futile effort to be sociable but ended up becoming more testy, frequently quarrelling with his classmates.
The bad news is life is futile and we're all going to die. The Sun
To date the unions have restricted workers' opposition to protest stoppages and futile appeals to the state and national government.
The introduction of the Indian mongoos, or _mangouste_ (ichneumon), proved futile as a means of repressing the evil. Two Years in the French West Indies
My efforts to go back to sleep proved futile.
Critics say it is a futile money-saving exercise which endangers patients. The Sun
I crawled out into the daylight and jogged round the cemetery in a futile attempt to warm myself up. A NASTY DOSE OF DEATH
It had become clear that my mother would not make another of her miraculous comebacks; the chief resident admitted that keeping her on the ventilator was a futile exercise. In the Fullness of Time
Deciding this act to be futile, he took a longer glance, squinting beady eyes in the dark, and gestured his yellow thumb in the direction of the door.
Regarding as futile the compromises accepted by other Catholic leaders, he fought alike all philosophical theories and political arrangements that did not come up to the full traditional Christian standard.
In the manner of my friend I was at once struck with an incoherence — an inconsistency; and I soon found this to arise from a series of feeble and futile struggles to overcome an habitual trepidancy, an excessive nervous agitation. Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. In Two Volumes. Vol. I
He brought his arm up in a futile attempt to ward off the blow.
Much research in the meantime had been directed to treatments for HLTV - 3 in a futile effort, because it was a lentivirus after all.
I may have provoked it by flirting with him at our first encounter and I made a futile attempt of redeeming myself by trying to steer away from the coquetry to something tamer.
He must have realized that trying to analyse someone who was not ill and not asking for help was a futile exercise from the patient's point of view, though not from his own.
All this pretentious over-ornamentation is cosmeticism, the powder and paint of the vulgarian striving to conceal by a futile advertisement her lack of refinement. Germany and the Germans From an American Point of View
Tourism should not be allowed to become another football for the tiresome and futile political arena.
Kevin made one last futile attempt to persuade Sandra to go with him, then left.
Debating the contrary would be arduous and futile, as the Minnesota Representative is not typically photogenically challenged. Jason Kitchen: Newsweek's Cover Photo Does Not Imply Michele Bachmann is Crazy...
All forms of dedication, devotion, loyalty and self-surrender are in essence a desperate clinging to something which might give worth and meaning to our futile, spoiled lives.
Nothing could be more futile and self-defeating than such a strategy.
A Libyan government spokesman called the predawn attack by at least two guided bombs a futile attempt on Col. Rebel Gains Fail to End Siege of Libyan City
The president described these activities as futile.
However, despite having seen this scenario on so many occasions, councils continue to plough on with these futile policies, convincing themselves that ‘this time will be different’.
If the pole has not got sufficient strength, there is a tendency to torsion or slight movement which renders the installation futile.
The great hubbub of the crowd made it futile to call for him.
And of all the unreckoned waves advancing, lifting their fugitive crests, and roaring, there certainly was not one that fell with weight so futile as his own. Springhaven
If Voltaire had studied Hume, moreover, he might have learned how futile and inappropriate it is in the long run to examine a religion otherwise than in its most fundamental and comprehensive general ideas, and how narrow and superficial would every philosophic appreciation ultimately find what he called refutation by facts. Voltaire
Ordinarily you'd regard such focus on the past as futile, but the resulting insights are riveting and applicable to other equally complex situations. Times, Sunday Times
And futile bullying, too, because once somebody stood up to the Government they retreated. DARE CALL IT TREASON
Slattery knew it would be futile to go to school authorities-his parents, also volunteers, had previously told the superintendent of their own suspicions, and were "brow beat" for making allegations without proof-so the next morning he called the Texas Rangers. Forbes.com: News
Of those familiar friends of his, we can say that "no man's thought keeps the roadway better than theirs," and all to show how futile is the attempt to measure such a man with the footrule of the conventions. The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 33, July, 1860
I must confess, Holmes, I had thought there were few more futile questions than speculations about the existence of atoms.
I've tried to relieve some fear about legalization so that you might understand more clearly how futile and destructive marijuana prohibition is and why it should be ended. Jesse Levine: A Letter to the Undecided: Prop 19
If life is futile, well, why not? Times, Sunday Times
Their costly and futile attempt to subjugate the Afghans lasted just 10 years.
Mercifully, commenter "harumph" pops by with a futile attempt to restore sanity: "Coleman's lead eroded all day Thursday as the Canvassing Board considered a pile of challenges brought entirely by the Coleman campaign. Fat nigger jokes, SDA-style.
Theirs is an all-consuming love - compulsive, illicit and ultimately futile.
After some time spent in a futile effort to disabuse him of some of his favourite ideas, she was rendered speechless.
Interestingly enough, I avoided emitting a stream of profanities as I made a completely futile attempt to steer.
And then all the life and lilt went out of them, and they were again maundering and futile things, getting in one another's way, stumbling and shuffling through the darkness, hesitating to grasp ropes, and, when they did take hold, invariably taking hold of the wrong rope first. CHAPTER VIII
‘Specifying it, particularizing it, nailing meaning down, was futile’.
The lumbering shuttle lazily side slipped from port to starboard and back in futile attempts to shake off pursuit.
Lenin also argued that the "spontaneous struggle" of the revolutionary intelligentsia did not lead to the creation of a revolutionary consciousness-it led only to acts of excitative terrorism (such as the Narodniks had futilely engaged in). Bloggers.Pakistan
So it's a futile effort to try to climb up to God, which is why he sent his son to be our savior.
Michael's weak attempt to stifle a laugh was futile.
Instead, almost a year has been wasted in futile attempts to appease the Republicans and the Mass. disaster has struck. Matthew Yglesias » Our Broken Institutions
But the slightly futile gesture of outwitting corporate no-marks is more than offset by the final scene.
It was obvious to everyone except the old man that this was an entirely futile undertaking, and, when it was eventually published, the metrical translation of the Psalms received absolutely no acclaim whatever.
I sit here, all the doors and windows closed, the stereo up, the swamper rattling futilely overhead as it sucks in sulfurous smoke, wishing to drown out the noise that so delights others. Mjh's blog — 2008 — July
Resistance is futile: you are about to become a devotee of track cycling. Times, Sunday Times
Not only was my attempt at writing a note on the door tag laughingly futile, the shipping guy's yellow note taped next to the airbill telling the driver to "please drop off box at apartment office if no one is home" was ridiculously unnecessary since ALL OF THIS could've been avoided if he'd just checked the NO SIGNATURE REQUIRED box. Haloaskew Diary Entry
Mark gives numerous reasons for his attitude, along with somewhat threatening insinuations that resistance is futile and that ‘they’ will destroy you if you try.
As a deterrent to boatpeople, the mindless sabre-rattling by the Australian government is utterly futile.
I've been somewhat out of touch for the past two weeks (fill in your own joke here) on holiday in Sri Lanka where England's squad for the Ashes did not noticeably spark much interest and, about the time it was being announced, I was making a futile attempt to brush up my knowledge of the island's birdlife. What now for Indian cricket in the post-Lalit Modi era?
His efforts to cast out this personal "debil" were futile, and as the poor creature lapsed into unconsciousness he would blow gusty breaths upon her big black eyes. Confessions of a Beachcomber
they made a futile play for power
Their attempts were impressive but ultimately futile.
After a few minutes of futile searching, I had a brainstorm.
But Harry's resistance to his chosen-ness is different, partly because unlike the Skywalker boys he has no choice about it --- resistance is futile in his case, which makes it more admirable but less heroic --- but mainly because in Rowling's conception being the Chosen One is not a heroic thing. Lance Mannion:
Still wearing his uniform and combat webbing, the son of a Canadian soldier jumped into the chest-deep sludge and began searching, reaching out with his arms, diving under in futile attempts to find her.
In a voiceover, he remarks that it's not death he fears but a futile life, but, from his hangdog expression and recklessness toward his health, it's clear that he's already given into that feeling of futility.
If the West's behaviour is futile, it is because the tide of history is against it.
Given that none of the other parties are prepared to go into coalition with the Tories - evidence of how, in some respects, the "decontamination" mission has been futile - there would have been less to lose and much to gain by being the intellectual outliers and punching far above their weight rather than, as was too often the case, not punching at all. Reviving Scottish Conservatism: A Lost Decade?
You shift from one leg to the other, but know that that is a fairly futile attempt to relieve your discomfort.
Here, then, is a fact that our Martian (but few Americans) might notice: in almost nine years of futile and brutal war in Afghanistan and more than seven years of the same in Iraq, the U.S. has filled metaphorical tower upon tower with the exceedingly unmetaphorical bodies of civilian innocents, via air attacks, checkpoint shootings, night raids, artillery and missile fire, and in some cases, the direct act of murder. Tom Engelhardt: Whose Hands? Whose Blood? Killing Civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq
The company has opted instead for a legal challenge that looks futile and self-defeating. Times, Sunday Times
It is futile because we cannot fully join the ranks and chase what is called the American Dream.
Each will sit on a breadboard engraved with text matching European with African languages in what Boshoff sees as a futile but poignant attempt to claim a common humanity.
The work he seemed to reject, in 1970, was not a single-minded oeuvre, but spanned a remarkable range, from delicate and almost serene studies in red crosshatching that look a bit like a sunset imposed on Monet's waterlilies, to thick, roughly painted and dark forms in the early to mid-1960s that suggest not so much abstraction as a futile effort to paint over and blot out suppressed figurative ideas. Art reviews: 'Philip Guston, Roma' and 'David Smith Invents' at the Phillips
You speak as though we all exist as helpless puppets ordained to live a certain way, and that to struggle against this cookie-cutter is wrong and futile. The Volokh Conspiracy » Sex Education, Dirty Words, and the Due Process Clause
Attempts to get supplies to the region are futile because troops will not allow the aid convoy to enter the city.
A Libyan government spokesman called the predawn attack with at least two guided bombs a futile attempt on Col. NATO Strikes Gadhafi Compound
He had been undergoing mechanotherapy for close to four hours and it struck him as futile. Bad Medicine
Why should the Tory rebels vote for a wrecking amendment which has been rendered futile?
He said that too often debate between the religious and nonreligious became a futile battle of anecdote. Times, Sunday Times
Negotiating with Iran: probably unnecessary and futile, unless you postpone the resolution of conflicts with Palestinians and Syria until they form an aliance with Iraq and Iran. Matthew Yglesias » Haim Saban
Puritanism found futile, inexecutable, execrable, -- yes, that gallows-tree has been a fingerpost into very strange country indeed. Past and Present Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII.
His desperate alliance with Trotsky and Kamenev against Stalin proved futile, and he was dismissed from all offices in 1926, and expelled from the party in 1927.
Sachin goes on the back foot, covers the line of the ball, the bat goes up ever so gentle and then with a low backlift swings to meet the ball seam-up, the meat of the willow taps the ball, it edges past the outstretched fingers of Wasim, brushes past the umpire and races toward the boundary, the mid-off and mid-on players giving up the futile chase half-way through. Personal - Cricket Nostalgia
a futile effort
Whether you enjoy it as kitsch singalong or classic family entertainment, resistance is futile. Times, Sunday Times
So strong was the play-instinct in him, as well as was his constitution strong, that he continually outplayed Scraps to abject weariness, so that he could only lie on the deck and pant and laugh through air-draughty lips and dab futilely in the air with weak forepaws at Michael's continued ferocious-acted onslaughts. CHAPTER XI
I would almost suggest this young chap take up writing instead of drawing, but one look at this penmanship and I know that would be just as futile a pursuit.
There is real hope, probably futile, that the second hike to 17.5 percent will somehow be wished away.
In the manner of my friend I was at once struck with an incoherence -- an inconsistency; and I soon found this to arise from a series of feeble and futile struggles to overcome an habitual trepidancy -- an excessive nervous agitation. Southern Prose and Poetry for Schools
It does indeed seem counterintuitive to continue the heartbreaking and futile process of militarizing the area, bullying and repatriating people.
Surely Mother Nature meting out carnage on such a grand scale shows just how petty and futile man-made squabbles really are.
Newspapers and blogs speak of the "ant tribe" of recent graduates living in cramped basements in the country's big cities while futilely searching for work.
US troops returning from a futile mission to track down the rocketeers described the experience as ‘just like Vietnam.’
Guilty leaders desperately attempt an all to obvious distraction by instigating insurgencies against enemies both foreign and domestic in a futile last ditch effort knowing full well the world policeman is dead further adding to the misery and despair with a massive tsunamic flood of blood. WHAT REALLY HAPPENED
That is using pigheaded futile tactics or well thought out strategies. Think Progress » VIDEO: On Anniversary Of Oklahoma City Bombing, Armed Right-Wing Activists Accuse Obama Of Tyranny
Therefore, the whole political campaign against the extreme right is futile.
Any hedging, any trying to talk the man out of lowering the gun at this stage would, Gareth registered, be futile. A DAYSTAR OF FEAR
His worst fears assuaged, Cazaril abandoned his futile attempt at invisibility, and nerved himself to ask Lady Betriz for one roundel. THE CURSE OF CHALION
The first is to make a futile attempt to plug into the island's glamorous past. Times, Sunday Times
Attempts to get supplies to the region are futile because troops will not allow the aid convoy to enter the city.
At any rate, he concludes that futile exercises in sonic definition are not in his job description; they are the provenance of journalists, publicists, managers, and other music industry wonks.
Their costly and futile attempt to subjugate the Afghans lasted just 10 years.
At the first bout they strove with steel, and were ill-matched at that, for the heavy strength of the fenman was futile against the lithe speed of the hunter. The Path of the King
This, ultimately, is a play about existential resemblances and contrasts, kinships and irreconcilables, uncomfortable truths and futile lies that underlie delicate relationships and unbridgeable chasms.
Likewise, it's quite futile to search for daftodi (a plant of the mountains) in a swamp or cowbane in the desert.
In the manner of my friend I was at once struck with an incoherencean inconsistency; and I soon found this to arise from a series of feeble and futile struggles to overcome an habitual trepidancy, an excessive nervous agitation. The Fall of the House of Usher
But let them also desist from their futile campaign to make it an indispensable badge or emblem of our sense of ‘Irishness’.
A lack of evidence in absence of harm cannot be interpreted as useless or futile.
Being an intellectual, I would surely overanalyse my fear and craft it into some pseudo-argument for why voting is futile in the first place. Dove's Eye View:
He finished with 14 points on 6 for 19 shooting and nine assists, trying futilely in the fourth quarter to get a double-double. Wizards lose to Magic
Yet again her insomniac tendencies won out as she knew that seeking sleep any time soon would be futile as well as foolhardy.
a futile search for intelligent nightlife
Regulation can determine where germinal technologies develop and how publicly they are used, but resistance is futile, since it is impossible to stop the technology everywhere.
However, despite having seen this scenario on so many occasions, councils continue to plough on with these futile policies, convincing themselves that ‘this time will be different’.
People without his political pull have spent years futilely trying to clear their names.
It would be futile to hope that athletes might be encouraged toward exemplary behaviour.
Policy strategies which attack the social and economic determinants of ill-health are dismissed as futile attempts at social engineering.
I deemed it futile to explain to him the punk-grunge influence on post-material chic.
I think you would've remembered them if... "The woman had become an obelisk; it was futile to continue. FURTHER TALES OF THE CITY
It was always a futile exercise. Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing
The company has opted instead for a legal challenge that looks futile and self-defeating. Times, Sunday Times
She is given a terminal diagnosis and told treatment is futile by a consultant as soon as the results are revealed.
Breitmann had entered the employ of the admiral for the very purpose for which M. Ferraud had journeyed sundrily into the cellar and beaten futilely on the chimney. A Splendid Hazard
futile years after her artistic peak
Generations of very clever Foreign Office eminences have devoted their meagre resources to just one futile aim - punching above our weight on the world stage.
Rodney was fighting futilely against them as his red hair fell messily into his terror-stricken green eyes.
This desperate, presumably futile struggle for continued improvement is called the hedonic treadmill. 10,000 Birds
Deledda's recurrent image of corruptibility is also found in "While the East Wind Blows," the short story published on this web site, in which the peasants harbor the futile dream of not being reduced to ashes, non essere ridotti in cenere. Grazia Deledda: Voice of Sardinia
It is, therefore, futile to state that this was solely the policy of Pitt after he had "remodelled" the Russian proposals.] [Footnote 12: "Corresp., The Life of Napoleon I (Volume 2 of 2)
It will turn out a futile attempt.
As a deterrent to boatpeople, the mindless sabre-rattling by the Australian government is utterly futile.
His men made repeated but ultimately futile attempts to retrieve his body from no-man's land.
Signing onto just any training course may prove to be a futile exercise. Life Without Work
A consensus on good taste is a futile ambition, for who knows what it would be, and who cares?
Many people speak loosely of others living useless or futile lives, as if a person's worth can be gauged on the basis of his or her activity.
Likewise, when George Westinghouse, inventor of the airbrake, having finally persuaded the directors of the Pennsylvania Railroad, after many futile attempts in other directions, to grant him an opportunity to try out his invention, and, trying it out -- on a string of cars near Opportunities in Engineering
Only now have I realised what a totally futile pet a hamster is. Times, Sunday Times
They do not show an act of suicide but an attempt, however futile, to escape death.
Seemingly, the Soviets took the ball out, threw a futile long pass downcourt and the horn sounded ending the game.
Ordinarily you'd regard such focus on the past as futile, but the resulting insights are riveting and applicable to other equally complex situations. Times, Sunday Times
I've been searching jokes as a futile attempt to cure my boredness. Super-suzan Diary Entry
Not because they want to die, but because death renders life so futile and meaningless they decide to check out of it. Christianity Today
Futile or not, I rummaged through the contents of my case for the digitalin I had made for him. Dragonfly in Amber
These distinctions are known to criticism as Jl, J2, etc.; but, though they stand for undoubted literary facts, it is altogether futile to attempt, on this basis, an analysis of the entire document into its component parts. Introduction to the Old Testament
This period which then seemed so futile and eventless is now of great importance to me. Homage to Catalonia
In short, those negative precepts which we call taboo are just as vain and futile as those positive precepts which we call sorcery. Chapter 3. Sympathetic Magic. § 2. Homoeopathic or Imitative Magic
Can there be anything more futile than to combine the huge range of music we find under the vapid and vacuous heading Easy Listening?
Based on this dubious proposition, the researchers bizarrely advocate what they call "futile busyness, namely, busyness serving no purpose other than to prevent idleness. The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com
Oliver Cromwell's body hung on the Tyburn gallows, the type of Puritanism found futile, inexecutable, execrable. Past and Present Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII.
They pretended that the ships were not sufficient, or sufficiently furnished with provisions for a voyage to Europe, and that, therefore, General Howe contemplated the shorter voyage to Sandy Hook or Delaware; and they further pretended that some of the British soldiers had secreted their cartouch-boxes, which were, they said, comprehended in the technical term "arms," and upon such futile and unfounded pretensions they gravely concluded that the convention was broken. The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. From George III. to Victoria
What mattered to me in my dispeopled kingdom, that in regard to which the disposition of my carcass was there merest and most futile of accidents, was supineness in the mind, the dulling of the self and of that residue of execrable frippery known as the non-self and even the world, for short. Samuel Beckett's First Love
The guests present on the occasion tried to resolve the dispute amicably but all the efforts to motivate the groom proved futile, the eyewitnesses said.
At the completion of the game, Warne lapped up yet another standing ovation from the 79,000-strong crowd, the champ responding in kind, bowing and blowing kisses to the crowd before a futile attempt to chair him off the ground.
As Cardinal he always spoke out against futile oecumenical endeavours, even if he could have done so more forcefully. The return of the Sedia Gestatoria?

How To Use Futile In A Sentence

Report a problem

Please indicate a type of error

Additional information (optional):