Word: banality
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...quite a career for himself With the money he's made from Saturday Night Live, movie appearances, and records, you'd think he could finally afford to hire writers to make his material funny, but no--Martin is an individualist, and insists on continuing his frantic pursuit of the banal...
...data--in four months of the New York Times, for example, Harvard was mentioned in connection with its graduates three times more than all other colleges combined. Essentially, the book is a 237-page collection of odd quotes, bizarre statistics, dull anecdotes, and drivel. The author strikes a particularly banal chord when he tries to add some organization to his endless list of alums. At one point, he tries to explain the difference between the proto-Harvard man--one whose ancestors also attended the school--and the neo-Harvard man. From there, he somehow gets around to talking about...
...changes have produced fierce reactions from a number of literary taste makers. W.H. Auden, who saw early versions before he died in 1973, said that liturgically speaking, the Episcopal Church "seems to have gone stark raving mad." Much of the new edition is "pedestrian, second-rate, banal," snaps Literary Critic Cleanth Brooks. Episcopal leaders generally dismiss such remarks as elitist fuming. The people in the pews, they insist, are grateful for the new version...
...ever decided what television is really supposed to be for. Is the wondrous box meant to entertain? To elevate? To instruct? To anesthetize? The medium, in its sheer unknowable possibilities, seems to arouse extreme reactions: contempt for its banal condition as the ghetto of the sitcom, or else grandiose metaphysical ambitions for a global village. The tube is Caliban and Prospero, cretin and magician. "What makes television so frightening," writes Critic Jeff Greenfield, "is that it performs all the functions that used to be scattered among different sources of information and entertainment." Television could, if we let it, electronically consolidate...
...data-- in four months of the New York Times, for example, Harvard was mentioned in connection with its graduates three times more than all other colleges combined. Essentially, the book is a 237-page collection of odd quotes, bizarre statistics, dull ancedotes, and drivel. The author strikes a particularly banal chord when he tries to add some organization to his endless list of alums. At one point, he tries to distinguish the difference between the proto-Harvard man--one whose ancestors also attended the school-- and the neo-Harvard man. From there, he somehow gets around to talking about...