Word: banalized
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...brand of nostalgia is manifest: until the McCain story hit the Web, sitting atop the website’s “Most Emailed” list was a story about “celebrating the semicolon” on a subway poster. The piece, beginning with this most banal of leads, develops into a disconcerting death knell for the richer punctuation of yesteryear: prominent lefties like Noam Chomsky wax elegiac and crack wise about grammar, the implicit assumption being that people under seventy see the semi-colon and think, “what’s wrong with that...
...beat, the track isn’t much different from its predecessors, but you’ll take what you can get after the first twenty-odd minutes of repetition. The aural pleasure is short-lived, however, as the second half of the album immediately returns to its former banal self. The closing track, “Waiting for the World,” will more likely find the listener simply waiting for the album to end. Once it finally does, it’s so forgettable that it’s hard to even remember what made the disc...
...Were the new lyrics much worse than those of other countries? In its banal catalogue of local scenery and anodyne call for brotherly love, the winning entry is hardly alone (Austria: "Land of mountains, land on streams, land of fields, land of cathedrals"; Canada: "True patriot love in all thy sons command"). Admittedly countries like Norway and India do better than most with the same elements, but they had Nobel laureates (Bjornstjerne Bjornson and Rabindranath Tagore respectively) writing their lyrics. And if some nations have tended to whip up enthusiasm with a ribald reference or two (the now decertified second...
...else Stephen King would be on the AP English syllabus. Rather, a work is considered “good” because it points to something deeper, in society or in ourselves, beyond the realm of ordinary human experience. Tolstoy’s genius was to take something as banal as Anna’s infidelity and give it a darker psychological twist...
...this exuberance, this pride, this community disappears suddenly as the exceedingly ambitious, driven, and self-motivated freshmen get absorbed in their studies, banal extracurricular pursuits, and the demands of quotidian life. For the remainder of the undergraduate tenure, Harvard pride makes a triumphant re-entry only four succeeding times: each year on the weekend before Thanksgiving. For the rest of the time, Harvard students are sometimes critical of, often self-deprecating about, but mostly oblivious to their college’s rich past...