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What is "banal"

Crossword clues for banal

banal
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
banal
adjective
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ a banal argument
▪ I was expecting an interesting interview but he only asked a few banal questions about the weather.
▪ It was just another banal newspaper story.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Even while the banal dialogue washes over you, the kicks and jumps remain spectacular.
▪ Everybody says sorry and life goes on - it's that banal.
▪ He was cautious, banal and predictable.
▪ Not that Springer is evil, though he is certainly banal.
▪ Some of the means used by the military to explain mechanical procedures are devastating in their banal degradation.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Banal

Banal \Ban"al\, a. [F., fr. ban an ordinance.] Commonplace; trivial; hackneyed; trite.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
banal

"trite, commonplace," 1840, from French banal, "belonging to a manor, common, hackneyed, commonplace," from Old French banel "communal" (13c.), from ban "decree; legal control; announcement; authorization; payment for use of a communal oven, mill, etc." (see ban (v.)). The modern sense evolved from the word's use in designating things like ovens or mills that belonged to feudal serfs, or else compulsory military service; in either case it was generalized in French through "open to everyone" to "commonplace, ordinary," to "trite, petty."

Wiktionary
banal

a. common in a boring way, to the point of being predictable; containing nothing new or fresh.

WordNet
banal

  1. adj. obvious and dull; "trivial conversation"; "commonplace prose" [syn: commonplace, trivial]

  2. repeated too often; overfamiliar through overuse; "bromidic sermons"; "his remarks were trite and commonplace"; "hackneyed phrases"; "a stock answer"; "repeating threadbare jokes"; "parroting some timeworn axiom"; "the trite metaphor `hard as nails'" [syn: commonplace, hackneyed, old-hat, shopworn, stock(a), threadbare, timeworn, tired, trite, well-worn]

Wikipedia
Banal

Banal describes something that is common in a boring way, to the point of being predictable.

Banal may also refer to:

  • Joel Banal (born 1958), former Filipino professional basketball player
  • AJ Banal (born 1988), Filipino professional boxer
  • Banal (film), a 2008 Filipino film

Usage examples of "banal".

The food and liquor were splendid and nothing banal, boring or asinine was said.

All the detritus of high tech, awaiting apotheosis as the next generation of Betan ingenuity, gleamed out amid more banal and universal human rubbish.

Compared with its predecessor, its personnel are thought of as nondescript, its utterances and decrees banal patriotic pieties lacking either the authentic conflicts of the Constituent or the feverish militancy of the Convention.

For example, the relatively plotless part 1 presents itself as a hyperintelligent TV sitcom, complete with brainy children, zany friends, and banal conflicts.

At the beginning of my journey the original over-sized tackies had been a banal signal of the end of the Judge, his stormtroopers, the hostel and Mevrou: a grotesque chapter in my life.

The man was driven along by the incessant, hot sugar of that energy which drives the race and which, with its unvaried repetition of oaths, ejaculations, denials, affirmations, and exactitudes, lavished at every minute upon the most trivial episodes of life, can become more drearily tedious than the most banal monotone.

Culture had been on the far side of the galaxy from the Affront home planet, and contacts between the Culture and the Affront had been unusually sparse for a long time for a variety of frankly banal reasons.

Here we have the rather banal world of New Age talk-show blather as the public face of a very real and bloody attempt to reshape the world.

They exchanged a few hopelessly banal words, phatic utterances empty of hope.

Such banal activity ignores Truth and buries oneself and others deeper into samsara and its hells.

I wound down the steep schoolward paths, the northern side of the island seemed oppressed and banal in comparison.

Ray Scutter would have made an interesting subject, Chris thought, but he was supposed to be hard to approach, and his public pronouncements were so predictably banal that better journalists than Chris had written him off as a lost cause.

The whole is decidedly cheap, banal, commonplace and unmysterious as a room could well be.

Guilt over the fact that they do not embody the magnificent sadness of politicans and the brooding sympathy of anchorpersons, that their grief is a flawed posture, streaked with the banal, with thoughts of sex and football, cable bills and job security.

Guilt over the fact that they do not embody the magnificent sadness of politicians and the brooding sympathy of anchorpersons, that their grief is a flawed posture, streaked with the banal, with thoughts of sex and football, cable bills and job security.