What's the difference between banal and commonplace?

Banal


Definition:

  • (a.) Commonplace; trivial; hackneyed; trite.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The problem is no longer that it's brazen, but that it's banal.
  • (2) The banalities of a news conference take on a strange significance when the men who summon the world's cameras are members of a feared insurgent group that banned television when they ruled Afghanistan and sheltered al-Qaida.
  • (3) As human papilloma virus type 5 is known to have malignant potential, clinicians should be on the lookout for these banal-looking and distinctly non-warty lesions in renal transplant recipients.
  • (4) But neither Jalili nor any other candidate has so far offered much in the election other than banalities – despite Iran's mounting problems, which now centre on the reduction of oil exports from 2.2m barrels a day to 1.1m in the past year due to tightening western sanctions.
  • (5) Most of the macroscopically visible abnormalities of the placenta are of no functional significance, the major exception to this general banality being the uncommon large haemangioma which can cause complications in the mother, fetus and neonate.
  • (6) He does this quite a lot, and even fairly banal details about his personal life are injuncted the moment they're out of his mouth, which is frustrating but unsurprising, given his publicity-shy reputation.
  • (7) Instead a banally labelled Office for Students (OfS) is to be created.
  • (8) Achebe's writing isn't anything as banal as cultural relativism – something he has been accused of – but a powerful refutation of the fact that before the white man, Africa was a "blank sheet of civilisation".
  • (9) So Zhou Enlai’s famous reply was actually quite banal – yet is now universally reinterpreted as a gem of sempiternal Chinese wisdom.
  • (10) And, at a time when Apple was essentially reinventing home electronics, Fiorina’s spectacularly banal mission statement was, “ Invent ” which is probably why we’re not all calling all tablets “H-Pads” today.
  • (11) There is indeed evidence to indicate that signaling molecules involved in cellular communication are 'banalized': that means that their receptors are liable to be expressed in almost any tissue by a wide variety of cells.
  • (12) Particular difficulty was experienced with small (less than 5 mm), flat lesions, which can be banal or potentially malignant.
  • (13) “One could clearly see from the evidence presented that Mladić, Karadžić and others from the Serb leadership of the time were not mythical characters – neither monsters, as the Bosniak victim narrative paints them, nor heroes and “fathers of the nation” as they are presented by the dominant Serb politic – but banal, self-centred opportunists drunk on the unchecked power to command lives and deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
  • (14) Alternatively, might it not suggest that quite apart from banal, administrative, bureaucratic "filtering" – routine chucking out cases sent by applicants many years after a final domestic disposal, or without any domestic proceedings having been undertaken – the court is already making extensive use of highly discretionary concepts such as "manifestly ill-founded" to pre-judge the interest of its caseload, and is already selecting cases which it regards as "serious" or "important"?
  • (15) It's a trajectory that is on the one hand explainable, even banal.
  • (16) It looks as if someone, in a great hurry, has crammed details of the most banal US shopping mall design of the late 1980s and more recent Chinese design into a laptop in their student bedsit, pressed the "print" button and then, unbelievably, convinced someone, in an equal hurry, to build them.
  • (17) Occasionally, Sting sings in the sort of broad Newcastle accent he has never revealed before, the one he has previously felt placed him back in the small terraced street he grew up in, a place he once described as an "enclave of banality".
  • (18) As for bacterial pneumonias they usually present as an acute lobar pneumonia with a banal organism but severe gram negative pneumonias are possible justifying a detailed systematic approach in certain cases.
  • (19) That is why May should throw away the banalities and try to address a fundamental truth.
  • (20) Therefore it is very important to inform all patients and their parents about the low, but lifelong risk of infection following splenectomy in order to begin the antibiotic therapy as soon as possible even in cases of banal infections.

Commonplace


Definition:

  • (a.) Common; ordinary; trite; as, a commonplace person, or observation.
  • (n.) An idea or expression wanting originality or interest; a trite or customary remark; a platitude.
  • (n.) A memorandum; something to be frequently consulted or referred to.
  • (v. t.) To enter in a commonplace book, or to reduce to general heads.
  • (v. i.) To utter commonplaces; to indulge in platitudes.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Well known buyout firms such as Blackstone and Carlyle appear in the leaked documents, and Luxembourg investment vehicles are commonplace in such investment firms.
  • (2) Knowledge of the normal radiographic appearance of ASD occlusion devices and the findings in various complications will be necessary for radiologists as transcatheter ASD closure becomes more commonplace.
  • (3) That culture was reinforced elsewhere, with female staff told to smarten up, wear lipstick, and some required to attend trade shows where “booth babes” – scantily-clad models promoting products - were commonplace.
  • (4) Emergency medical response to a scene where hazardous materials are potentially involved is becoming more commonplace.
  • (5) At a time when the intrauterine diagnosis of hydrocephalus is commonplace and pioneering efforts of antenatal therapy are evolving, review of the chronology of treatment of this disorder becomes pertinent.
  • (6) According to Amnesty International, the death penalty “is so far removed from any kind of legal parameters that it is almost hard to believe”, with the use of torture to extract confessions commonplace.
  • (7) Like a great many people in what was at that time an industrial country, I grew up in a landscape that was interestingly pockmarked with successive eras of exploitation, and all of it so commonplace that beyond a mention of its origins, Watt's engine or Crompton's spinning mule, it never found a place in the history books.
  • (8) Supraventricular and ventricular arrhythmias remain relatively commonplace in the ICU.
  • (9) Rose, a Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design fine art graduate, said she is determined that the rules should be changed "as this treatment is becoming more commonplace for Crohn's disease sufferers and I would not want any other woman to have to go through this ordeal".
  • (10) The camera’s capers have almost become so commonplace that some presenters just ignore them.
  • (11) Hepatic transplantation is now a relatively commonplace procedure, performed at many institutions around the world.
  • (12) Talk about corruption in Russia is commonplace and in our history there have been attempts to curb it through repression.
  • (13) But although the technology has become commonplace in Japan, where it was first developed, banks in Britain say it could be years before they appear on UK high streets.
  • (14) Although advanced gastrointestinal cancer is the most commonplace problem encountered by the medical oncologist, this group of diseases has proved exceedingly resistant to past chemotherapy efforts.
  • (15) But although he says he is against extrajudicial killing of criminals, the record in his city of Davao suggests such killings have been commonplace there.
  • (16) If listeners treat sinusoidal signals as speech signals however unlike speech they may be, then perception should exhibit the commonplace sensitivity to the dimensions of the originating vocal tract.
  • (17) The disease started with a commonplace contusion of the patella and rapidly progressed after arthrotomy.
  • (18) Automation of the assay is now commonplace, from reagent dispensing to automated reading of finished assay.
  • (19) Complaints that steel products are being exported below production cost (“dumped”) from China to the US and the EU are commonplace.
  • (20) Those are commonplace tricks to bring pay far below the minimum wage.