otiose

But for Getachew Reda, president of the Tigray interim regional administration, those definitions are otiose.

Other times, helped along by the accounts of my Jesuit schoolteachers, I imagined him waiting, otiose and slightly bored—restless, as he had often seemed to be in life—in the long, cosmic queue of Purgatory.

Insisting that every branch also have a vault and a cash-handling teller would be otiose, Torstendahl told me, especially given the sharp decline in cash transactions in the past decade.

But when Chairman Mao Zedong unleashed his socialist society, dog ownership, like golf or capitalism, was regarded as an otiose affectation.

A few hundred years later, the Italian natural historian Ulysse Aldrovandi wrote briefly on the matter, revealing that the question was well-known but settled in the year 1600: “I pass over now that trite and thus otiose rather than curious question, whether the hen exists before the egg or vice versa. It is stated in the sacred books that the hen existed first. These books teach that animals were created at the beginning of the world; hence the hen did not come from the egg but from nothing.”