What's the difference between banal and dumb?

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.

Dumb


Definition:

  • (a.) Destitute of the power of speech; unable; to utter articulate sounds; as, the dumb brutes.
  • (a.) Not willing to speak; mute; silent; not speaking; not accompanied by words; as, dumb show.
  • (a.) Lacking brightness or clearness, as a color.
  • (v. t.) To put to silence.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Cheers, then, to an apparent alliance of the NME, a few people in London's trendy E1 district and some dumb young musicians, because "New Rave" is upon us, and there is apparently no stopping it.
  • (2) Four brain smears from dogs which died of dumb rabies were positive for Negri bodies while two brain smears obtained from dogs which died of the furious form of rabies were negative.
  • (3) The court heard that MP responded to Nimmo's message of "Dumb blonde bitch" with the message "That's dumb Dr blonde bitch to you".
  • (4) At the moment, most of our electricity and gas meters are dumb, analogue devices: they record your consumption and someone comes round periodically to take a reading.
  • (5) We now show by immunoelectron microscopy that Fab fragments of a desmin-specific monoclonal antibody mixed with the rod lead to dumb-bell-shaped structures.
  • (6) On admission, a dumb-bell type huge tumor with the destruction of the orbital roof was demonstrated on CT scan and MRI.
  • (7) The non-solid bacilli were further classified on the basis of their morphology to the following forms:-- (a) short but evenly stained (b) indented (c) beaded (d) dumb-bell shaped (e) coccoid and (f) fragmented.
  • (8) In an ideal world, such findings might be interpreted as smart women making smart choices, but instead it seems that this research is just adding fuel to the argument that women who don't have children, regardless of the reason, are not just selfish losers but dumb ones as well.
  • (9) Large granules, 160 nm in diameter, already reported in the ITP (KEMALI 1977a), are also shown as well as tiny flat mixed with large flat dense core vesicles of dumb-bell shape.
  • (10) Critics accused the BBC of dumbing down when Kirsty Young replaced Sue Lawley as host of Desert Island Discs, while t he dismissal of Ed Stourton from the Today presenting team was executed shambolically , with the presenter learning his fate from a rival news organisation rather than his bosses.
  • (11) As in canine rabies there are furious and dumb forms of the disease.
  • (12) Charlie Hebdo was launched by a group of "non-conformists" who had previously run a monthly called Hara Kiri (whose subtitle read: "dumb and nasty").
  • (13) He might have been born with a silver spoon and declared bankruptcy four or five times but he is not dumb.
  • (14) A GST on fresh food is an exceptionally dumb strategy in the midst of an obesity crisis | Catherine King Read more Labor said that much of that money would go towards compensating lower income earners, leaving little money for other services.
  • (15) Dumb rabies and cysticerci in dogs being sold to people in rural communities pose potential public health hazards.
  • (16) In a blog published on Friday afternoon entitled "My teenage mistakes" , Weldon said his year-long flirtation would have remained the embarrassing stuff of his youth had he not a few years later done what he described as a "dumb thing" and boasted about his past in an Oxford student newspaper.
  • (17) Mitt's now trying to rebut the "Let Detroit go bankrupt" line o argument, which is dumb.
  • (18) The internet of things is the idea of creating a home where everything is connected to the internet, creating “swarm intelligence” from individually dumb devices.
  • (19) Gove launched an all-out attack on the "educational establishment", claiming it suffered from "defeatism, political correctness and the entrenched culture of dumbing down".
  • (20) "We will tackle head-on the defeatism, the political correctness and the entrenched culture of dumbing down that is at the heart of our educational establishment."