How to Use formalism in a Sentence
formalism
noun-
From one point of view, quantum physics is just a set of formalisms, a useful tool kit.
—James Gleick, New York Times, 8 May 2018
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Despite all its formalism, math is not meant to have sacred texts that only the priests can read.
—Quanta Magazine, 10 Oct. 2019
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That formalism and abstraction corrupts the rest of us.
—Samuel Goldman, The Week, 3 Dec. 2021
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Refreshingly, the formalism of this new work is rarely cold.
—Los Angeles Times, 16 June 2021
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The Supreme Court of the United States performs its duties with a theatrical formalism.
—Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker, 11 Nov. 2019
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That sort of structural formalism is a part of the rote methodology that governs the thought of people who don’t have better ideas.
—Ben Yagoda, WSJ, 1 Sep. 2017
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And Haynes’s inept formalism is a poor version of Losey-epigone Peter Strickland’s high-style irony.
—Armond White, National Review, 10 Jan. 2024
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And running ribbon-like through the formalism is a familiar story: that of a girl, born to poor parents in a Norman town.
—Tobi Haslett, Harper's Magazine, 18 Sep. 2023
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The papers, which ran to more than 500 pages, were written in a novel formalism and contained many new terms and definitions.
—Quanta Magazine, 21 Dec. 2015
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Democracy may have been reduced to a crude civic formalism, but many are still fighting for a democratic life.
—Blair McClendon, The New Republic, 19 Jan. 2021
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The advance laid the groundwork for the entire formalism of black hole thermodynamics.
—Adrian Cho, Science | AAAS, 14 Mar. 2018
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Bell was a proponent of formalism, a school of thought that places beauty and artistic merit within the properties of an object.
—Ed Yong, Discover Magazine, 6 July 2011
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From concert halls to cabarets, French composers and their American counterparts created new works that ran the gamut from cool formalism to le jazz hot.
—Georgia Rowe, The Mercury News, 17 Mar. 2017
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But in his work, and apparently in his life as well, Johns lived out a hard, self-denying ethos that is common among artists who stress formalism over all else: that the artist must disappear into the work.
—Washington Post, 29 Sep. 2021
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There’s no assumption about how that happens: how the quantum formalism must be used to predict the probabilities of the outcomes.
—Quanta Magazine, 13 Feb. 2019
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There’s a stilted formalism to its aesthetic that feels as tightly wound up as its protagonist (and its lead actor), for better and for worse.
—Manuel Betancourt, Variety, 30 Mar. 2023
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As a choreographer, José Limón was full of emotion: Sterile formalism was never his thing.
—Gia Kourlas, New York Times, 3 May 2017
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Call it post-zombie or born-again formalism: this young artist’s paintings remind us of abstraction’s reason for being.
—Ryan Sullivan, The New Yorker, 31 Mar. 2017
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The cinematography is a little more anonymous than the cool, blanched formalism that Dupieux usually delivers, but the editing picks up the slack.
—Jessica Kiang, Variety, 11 Feb. 2022
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This is an early appeal to ideas of artistic formalism that would later triumph in abstraction.
—Philip Kennicott, Washington Post, 14 July 2022
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The film is also sort of a lush set piece; with the dad’s northern California winery aesthetic juxtaposed against the prim formalism of the mom’s London sitting rooms.
—Vogue, 17 July 2023
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The formalism of Thom Browne’s suiting might not seem analogous to the freedom and fury of the sports world, but Browne’s great strength as a designer is the ability to seamlessly shift between strict and spirited.
—Steff Yotka, Vogue, 30 Oct. 2018
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What places Clark in that tradition is not his formalism but rather his sonic imagination.
—Cat Cardenas, Rolling Stone, 14 Mar. 2024
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The result, alas, doesn’t live up to the promise of the occasion, turning the character’s journey into fodder for a sluggish exercise in formalism.
—Jon Frosch, The Hollywood Reporter, 3 Sep. 2022
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Claudia Goldin, a professor of economics at Harvard, thinks the way that the subject is taught—with an emphasis on formalism, rather than human dynamics—could be part of the problem.
—The Economist, 16 Dec. 2017
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Throughout her career, Ms. Mayer rejected formalism for the avant-garde.
—Alex Williams, New York Times, 4 Dec. 2022
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Aharonov’s approach is called the two-state-vector formalism (TSVF) of quantum mechanics, and postulates quantum events are in some sense determined by quantum states not just in the past—but also in the future.
—Philip Ball, Scientific American, 21 May 2018
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Its ironic tone sets aside formalism and complex narratives to allow for the naturalness and simplicity of the characters and its plots to shine.
—Anna Marie De La Fuente, Variety, 20 Sep. 2021
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Salterini says contemporary dance is the bringing together the formalism and bravado of ballet, the earthiness of modern dance and the rhythms and syncopation of jazz dance.
—Diana Dunbar, miamiherald, 17 Apr. 2018
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Several experts agreed that real numbers don’t seem to be physically real, and that physicists need a new formalism that doesn’t rely on them.
—Quanta Magazine, 7 Apr. 2020
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'formalism.' 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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