What is "prosaic"

Usage examples of "prosaic".

Her prime weaknesses, aside from the habit of prosaic disillusionment, are a tendency toward erroneous geography and history and a fatal predilection for bestrewing her novels with insipid little poems, attributed to one or another of the characters.

Regal, humourless, briskly prosaic, the Queen Dowager of Scotland had conducted the audience with her usual French competence and was bringing it to its usual racing conclusion.

Lucifer, the paraphrast comes to the Biblical part of the story, he follows the sacred text with servile fidelity, omitting no detail, however prosaic.

Chaucer crowns the satire on the romanticists by making the very landlord of the Tabard cry out in indignant disgust against the stuff which he had heard recited -- the good Host ascribing to sheer ignorance the string of pompous platitudes and prosaic details which Chaucer had uttered.

Those who disposed of him intended an irreversible demystification, something that would make the act of king-killing almost prosaic.

They were very similar to Elizabethan ballads, with an earthier, more direct quality than those smooth-flowing, prosaic pieces.

There was much more mystery in a shipload of horses-the nine hundred horses that were galloping through the head of Sir Henry Marquis-than in all the five prosaic years during which young Hargrave had succeeded his father as a jewel buyer.

Their ironbound frames and rugged dispositions make them hearty additions to the most prosaic farmyard.

The food for its satire, too, is most admirably chosen, for no feature of the social life of that place and period is more amiably absurd than the efforts of the handicraftsmen and tradespeople, with their prosaic surroundings, to keep alive by dint of pedantic formularies the spirit of minstrelsy, which had a natural stimulus in the chivalric life of the troubadours and minnesingers of whom the mastersingers thought themselves the direct and legitimate successors.

Darius knew anything at all about something so prosaic as the Milesian wool trade.

Starting with a prosaic scene on Earth, and following a scheme proposed by the designers Charles and Ray Eames, he goes progressively by factors of ten to show us the whole Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way and the Universe.

Despite their prosaic nature, he spoke each of these factoids blissfully, as though they were special joys to be shared in afterglow.

What the mealworms have to say to the three gentlemen may sound prosaic: the handsomest of the three is advised to insist, in his negotiations with the British authorities, on newspaper license No.

It is curious that more vividly than anything that came afterwards in the Spanish war I remember the week of so-called training that we received before being sent to the front -- the huge cavalry barracks in Barcelona with its draughty stables and cobbled yards, the icy cold of the pump where one washed, the filthy meals made tolerable by pannikins of wine, the trousered militia-women chopping firewood, and the roll-call in the early mornings where my prosaic English name made a sort of comic interlude among the resounding Spanish ones, Manuel Gonzalez, Pedro Aguilar, Ramon Fenellosa, Roque Ballaster, Jaime Domenech, Sebastian Viltron, Ramon Nuvo Bosch.

It was more prosaic than that: it was the route the troopships took to the south.