Word: banal
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...World. His first appearances in court are filled with flirtatious tension, mystery, and bravado, and Elizabeth becomes attracted to his otherworldliness to the point of envy. Yet Owen’s character quickly grows two-dimensional. Besides always presenting the same calm and manly front, Raleigh mechanically offers hopelessly banal pieces of advice to Elizabeth, like “We mortals have many weaknesses. We feel too much, hurt too much or too soon we die, but we do have the chance of love.” Even when Raleigh falls in love with Bess (Abbie Cornish), Elizabeth?...
...world filled with writers who write badly and stories that sell on shock value alone, there’s something satisfying about a book that manages to excel at both: butchering the English language while writing about a topic at once vulgar and banal. Hence my joy upon hearing of the release of “That Bitch: Protect Yourself Against Women with Malicious Intent,” a book that refers to the fairer sex as “domestic terrorists” or “Al’Qa’ida in high heels and lipsticks...
...from Queens, an African-American manager from Brooklyn-ethnic New York guys, outer-borough guys like me-the Mets began to hire some wonderful talent, and a sizzling crop of younger players suddenly materialized from the farm system. I found myself sucked into baseball fandom of the purest, most banal sort. I learned to love winning. I even expected them to win. Our playoff loss in 2006 to the St. Louis Cardinals was a fluke. Surely we would win this year. And we were winning-for the longest time. And then we were losing-spectacularly, with such garish determination that...
...Autumn of 1997, Yau Leung was just starting to earn a minor artistic reputation when he slipped off a ladder in his studio, hit his head, and died. That the light should have left the eyes of Hong Kong's greatest photographer in so banal a manner makes contemplation of his passing especially difficult. If photographers are not felled covering disgraceful coups or scrappy jungle wars, posterity likes them to advance to gurgling senility, feted by models, retrospectives and hand-numbered editions. There is no romance in death by lapse of concentration - especially not in a man whose defining artistic...
...Chanda also draws plenty of parallels with our own day. It's hard to tell whether these comparisons are contrived, elucidative or banal, but they mostly entertain in the way that popular history can. For example, he writes that today's sprawling multinational corporations are modeled on the crown-backed trading houses of England, Portugal and Holland, whose empires themselves followed a continuum stretching back to the ancient kingdoms of Mesopotamia. He contends that the silver and gold bullion mined in Mexico and Peru and shipped across oceans in galleons by the conquering Spanish preceded the convertible currencies and credit...