Veriest

Though in the course of his continual voyagings Ahab must often before have noticed a similar sight, yet, to any monomaniac man, the veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings.

If it had come to crawling before Mr Kurtz, he crawled as much as the veriest savage of them all.

He wheeled away down the narrow sandy street like the veriest derelict.

One commentator observed that “to connect the dinosaurs, creatures of interest to but the veriest dullards, with a spectacular extraterrestrial event” seemed “like one of those plots a clever publisher might concoct to guarantee sales.”