Word: banally
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...truth at Harvard shone from a tarnished setting of cultivated hypocrisy, in contrast to the let-it-all-hang-out confessions of the '70s. Yet, appearances, manners, and feelings are also truths; they can support good, bad, noble, or banal intentions. "A truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent," wrote Willian Blake. The issues then, as now, had to do with intention as much as truth, purpose as much as technique, loyalty as much as self-realization...
...does Farrell's style help much. Like some windy raconteur at the bar of the Raffles Hotel, he is diffuse and banal, occasionally clutching at his listener's elbow with a moralizing aside. His metaphorical flights can plummet ludicrously, as when he compares the cross section of a moment in history to a severed leg of lamb, "where you see the ends of the muscles, nerves, sinews and bone of one piece matching a similar ar rangement in the other." His characters "sink their teeth" into "weighty problems," accept things "lock, stock and barrel," and come to clanging...
Only when I can't get chopsticks," and so on. Mabry Jenkins' open-eyed adventures among the Philistines are at times tedious at times banal, at times almost hilarious but this book has limited appeal--you might read it because you read North Dallas Forty, in which case you won't like it as well as you like the previous book. Or you might read it because you read the sports pages and rooted for the Wehrmacht in the latest Super Bowl, in which case you won't like it all. Or you might read it because...
From the beginning, broadcasters feared that the series would be viewed as either too banal to be truly educational, or too anti-German to be effective. To counterbalance some of Holocaust's technical errors, ARD screened before the first installment a 90-minute documentary called Endlösung (final solution), using actual films of Hitler's rise and the grim reality of the death camps Stations broadcasting Holocaust set up telephone lines over which viewers could call in to panels of experts and survivors of Nazi persecution...
...exile since last October. There the journalists submit written questions, are bidden to sit cross-legged on the floor in a barren room, and then listen as Khomeini, dressed in his black turban and robe, delivers his answers in Farsi monotone. Khomeini's replies are usually short, banal and often repetitive. He can rarely be drawn out on crucial political issues: Who should rule the Islamic republic he espouses for Iran? What kind of nation would it be? How does he propose to bring down the fledgling government of Shahpour Bakhtiar? What role would the Ayatullah himself play...