Word: banally
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...have lately seen the heroes of a great moral war march home with a repertory of invective almost tragically thin and banal. Like any other Christian soldiers, they used a great deal of foul language in field and camp, but very little of it got beyond a few four-letter words . . ." This complaint, in which Burges Johnson concurs, would be perfectly sound if cursing were entirely a verbal matter, but it is not. Its effect is proportionate to the kidney of the curser. The four-letter banalities that bore Mr. Mencken might suffice to turn him pale when uttered...
Such notes are by no means as brilliant as those found in the papers of other modern greats, like Henry James or André Gide, but they are remarkable in that they show from what banal themes and ordinary observations Chekhov developed his stories. When he writes, "A young man made a million marks, lay down on them, and shot himself," the reader is in the authentic Chekhov atmosphere. Occasionally, as in the letters, Chekhov drops his attitude of severe objectivity and speaks about himself in that humorously modest fashion that led Tolstoy to call him a wonderful man: "Medicine...
Cultures for the ski team's banal illness are the tired, rock studded slopes surrounding Cambridge. Even during their short show of skiableness they are notable only in their gentleness compared to the Appalachians, where most of the matches are held. Steep slalom and downhill runs and realistically rugged cross country trails are out of reach of day-to-day car-borne practice trips...
...vicious circle by campaigning for the material, and its new contest is an important step. But the editors' obvious fear of being called neurotic or esoteric, coupled with their desire to print trash on the assumption that it will appeal to the non-literary student, limits them to the banal and the unimaginative. They would do well to forget about drama and poetry issues, windy articles and superficial literary crusades ("Where is drama heading?") for the time being, and concentrate on putting out the best material they can buy, beg, borrow, or steal, judged completely on its intrinsic worth...
Commissar's Delight. Composer Khachaturian's music is the kind that goes over well with commissars-because it also goes over well with the crowds. It has, like Tchaikovsky's music, melody, bounce and color-and basically banal themes. Khachaturian's life in a bureaucracy is therefore not as complicated as that of his musical betters, Prokofiev, the sophisticated ex-exile, or jittery Dmitri Shostakovich, whose musical talents are wrenched by ideology. In the most recent sampling of Russian musical tastes, Khachaturian works proved to be the second most frequently performed in the U.S.S.R. (first, Prokofiev...