Word: banality
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...poem describing love she inflates nature with banal symbolism...
...them out to pasture because they were not team players." In July 1974, Hurlburt was moved to a new position as director of administrative services, a post which, although listed on Hall's organizational chart as a supervisory position for Food Services and three other departments, seems more banal than Hall acknowledges. In the spring, Butler was moved to a new job as director of policy and planning. In both instances, Hall apparently decided he wanted men who would follow his lead rather than provide their own leadership to the departments...
America's vocabularies, both public and private, are being corrupted in part by a curious style of bombast intended to invest even the most banal ideas with importance. Discussing his institution's money troubles, a university president promises: "We will divert the force of this fiscal stress into leverage energy and pry important budgetary considerations and control out of our fiscal and administrative procedures." This is a W.C. Fields newspeak, the earnestly pseudoprecise diction beloved of bureaucrats, who imagine that its blind impregnability will give their ideas some authoritative heft. In fact, it only confirms the Confucian maxim...
...managed to parlay his cool into one of the social myths of our time. During the '60s, Warhol's silence about himself and his knowingly dumb utterances about the culture he helped form-"Pop art is liking things"-underwrote his durability as a star. Indeed, his banality endowed him with an air of mystery, since few people could bring themselves to believe that any artist could possibly be so banal. They may soon be convinced of it, however, for Warhol is now both the author of a book and the subject of a retrospective exhibition...
Therein lies the flaw in virtually all biographies of entertainers. Performance is a mysterious process, often beyond the comprehension of performer-and critic. That mystery is worth dissection; everything else is a banal fever chart of catcalls and triumphs...