Word: banalized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Most U.S. Government secrets grow banal with age, but the very fact of their secrecy gives some of them an odd fascination. An enterprising publishing company called the Carrollton Press has begun selling microfilms of formerly classified documents that have entered the public domain as a result of amendments to the Freedom of Information Act (TIME, April 14). The Washington, D.C., firm's collection of 8,000 documents goes for $1,575. It includes such minutiae as then Ambassador to France Charles Bohlen's 1964 memorandum to Lyndon Johnson on Charles de Gaulle's tactics of "mystification...
...Woodside cut himself short. "I know it's sort of banal to end by calling for more learning," he apologized, but he went on to do just that, asserting that Vietnamese studies are still primitive, but that studying Vietnam's history, and the history of American involvement there, still has a purpose. "Confucius said that one must look for faults to emphasize goodness," he explained...
...Towering Inferno is one hell of a spectacle. The dialogue ranges from the banal to the trite, but only the most primitive phrases are appropriate to the very simple dynamics of the plot. A builder constructs a 135-story office-building-cum-apartment house, but in cutting costs, his son-in-law installs a faulty wiring system that starts a small fire as soon as the first switch is thrown. The fire detection and sprinkler system malfunction, of course, and, as a gala party of 300 bejewelled and tuxedoed guests gathers in the penthouse...
...Ozzie and Harriet, the embattled parents. Harriet's hands never quite know what to do with themselves and her body thrusts nervously forward, as she seeks reassurance "only that we're all together and a family." Snyder conveys well the strained motherliness of a woman whose ideal of banal domesticity inevitably leads her to deny...
...tables and floor buried under a dune of exhausted tubes, boxes, crumpled photographs, muck. These, so to speak, are the lineaments of gratified desire. "I never believed one should have any security and never expect to keep any," says Bacon. "After all, as existence in a way is so banal, you may as well try to make a kind of grandeur of it rather than be nursed to oblivion...