Word: banal
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...makes the game look easier, and for a public happy to interpret Ichiro's few, banal utterances ("Whether it's a good day or a bad day, I look back and find anyplace I can correct myself," he says. "I absorb it, digest it and come back the next day. That's all I can do") as proof of Zen profundity, there's the temptation to believe he received his gift from some monk on a mountaintop. It doesn't quite fit that Japan's master hitter actually grew up an American clichE: Ichiro worked himself to greatness...
...celebrate Elizabeth II's 50 years on the British throne, the question sounds churlish, even impertinent. Surely we should let the Brits have their fun, let the 76-year-old monarch-soul of probity and dutiful service-have her reward for a life sentence of grand ceremonies and banal conversations, without laboring to figure out why, in the 21st century, she ought to exist. But the question would not sound strange to Elizabeth herself. She has been grappling with it her whole life. And, in her implacable way, answering it because, after all, there she still is, waving and smiling...
...again, the Faculty should cap honors at a much lower level. If, say, only 10 percent of graduating seniors received honors, such distinction would only be awarded to those truly academically honorable students who had distinguished themselves by the highest academic standards of their peers. Inflation of honors is banal and indefensible. Harvard should at last take some real steps to solve a problem of its own making...
...accepted the fact that Noah and his problems could fill a battleship of parental duty and obligation, leaving my mother and father too spent to worry about the more banal problems of their normal son. But at some point in my early teens, in the confusing years of adolescence, I stopped having friends over. Noah's condition dictated what we ate and when we slept and to a great degree how we lived. We never had fancy furniture because he chewed on the couch cushions and spit on the carpets. He would pull apart anything more complicated than a pencil...
...have a foot firmly on both sides on the divide, but I feel liable to tumble into the crevasse below at any moment. Those who don’t know me are still keen to pigeonhole me as “that English kid,” asking tediously banal questions—just to set the record straight, no I do not know your friend Justin who comes from Sussex and went to the Northwestern summer school program with you—and insisting that I patiently bear their Austin Powers-esque impressions of me. My English friends, meanwhile...