Word: banality
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...printed pieces, Thurber was a master of turning a homely personal detail--his troubles with his housekeepers, say, or the night his bed collapsed--into an affecting, hilarious story. Thurber's character Walter Mitty, reduced to a life of fantasy in an otherwise banal existence, remains the quintessential twentieth-century nebbish...
...free-flowing nature of the sessions does have certain drawbacks. Corporate clients have sometimes been reluctant to adopt the group's recommendations, complaining that the topics themselves are often banal or irrelevant. Even so, SRI can point to some impressive successes. SRI's brainstorming technique zeroed in early on the nationwide trend toward home health care and quickly held seminars on the subject. In addition, TEAM sessions in the spring of 1980 focused on the rightward political lurch in the U.S. and the growth of religious fundamentalism...
Certainly one cannot traverse this banal movie territory and arrive at the essence of the campaign that supplies this film with its title. Historically, Gallipoli was a tragic epic. On this obscure Turkish peninsula, an outpost of empire was required to sacrifice the best and bravest of a generation in an ill-conceived, almost whimsical attempt to break the stalemate in the trenches of Western Europe. But the ground was wrong-too rugged-and the method of attack-an amphibious assault from small boats-entirely untried. The result was a stalemate as deadly as the one in France. All this...
...1800s, trailing herds of 3,000 longhorns across rushing rivers and hostile Indian territory, were hardly the stuff of dreams. But many young Easterners, nostalgic for the good life they had known before the horrors of the Civil War, were seduced to join up for what would prove banal, backbreaking labor. The pay for three months: $75 and all the beans one could swallow. On the drive, there were few shootouts with warpath tribes. Most drovers were happy to pay the 50?-per-head surcharge demanded by the Choctaw tribal council for crossing their land...
...film, photography, and commercial and industrial design transformed the traditional structure and function of a museum. He wanted, he said, to "show New York the best of modern architecture, posters, chairs and movies, and attack the complacency with which our successful designers contemplated their modernistic skyscrapers, pompous super-films, banal billboards, and the cynical promotion of artificial obsolescence...