Word: banalized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...feel for the peculiarly male, geeky world of collectordom. But while she finds myriad arresting ways to say celebrity is a modern religion--"All fandom is a form of tunnel vision: warm and dark and infinite in one direction"--that doesn't make the idea less banal, nor does it obviate the need for emotional investment. At a climactic moment, facing his father's impending yahrzeit (the anniversary of his death), Alex still protests, "I don't feel anything." He could be speaking for us. The Autograph Man is ultimately an acrobatic but unmoving disquisition on an old question: What...
...have just been stalling tactics," he says. "For Iraq to do that again now, now that it hears the drums of war beating, is nonsense." Undiplomatic language, perhaps, from a 60-year-old who has spent his career operating in the confines of foreign policy, where even the most banal utterances are carefully parsed. But where Iraq's weapons of mass destruction are concerned, Butler minces no words. "A complete lie" is how he describes Iraq's promises to comply with inspection: "From the beginning their declarations of what weapons they held were false." Though he and his team were...
...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...