What's the difference between banal and prosaic?

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.

Prosaic


Definition:

  • (a.) Alt. of Prosaical

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Short of setting up a hotline to the Met Office – or, more prosaically, moving to a country where the weather best suits our condition, as Dawn Binks says several sufferers she knows have done – migraineurs can do little to ensure that the climate is kind to them.
  • (2) More prosaically, but sensibly, the publishing division, which includes all of the company's newspaper titles, will retain the News Corp name when the company's separation occurs in July.
  • (3) He calls himself a micro-economist, or more prosaically, a "data guy".
  • (4) It always seemed too prosaic to say merely that he was governing director of Tennants Estate Ltd from 1967 to 1991 and chairman of the Mustique Company from 1969 to 1987.
  • (5) The prosaic question for the armchair mountaineer is, can the dying be saved?
  • (6) The question of what to do about it is, I'm afraid, disappointingly prosaic.
  • (7) Some of the company's actions are more prosaic than they may first appear.
  • (8) There is a bucolic tendency running deep in the national character, expressing itself in a love of rustic poets and painters, and it is this part of us that has turned to fury at the coalition government and its prosaically named Draft National Planning Policy Framework.
  • (9) If the second Wall Street feels flat in comparison, that's because that culture of greed is no longer novel or outrageous; it's almost prosaic.
  • (10) Gillian Guy, chief executive of Citizens Advice, is less prosaic, warning of an imminent crisis for many households: "Ofgem and the government have massive questions to answer.
  • (11) It has as clear a progression as a common cold, and is no less prosaic in its wanderings: loneliness, or discomfort in one's skin; enjoyable drug use; then reckless, or desperate, drug use; then denial; then recovery, or death.
  • (12) Rather, the answer is far more prosaic, which is French for "boring": fashion writers are quite lazy.
  • (13) Facebook Twitter Pinterest But a more prosaic response to Let the Music Use You might be to say that Knuckles implicitly understood what happened on a nightclub dancefloor because he spent virtually his entire life in nightclubs.
  • (14) And, more prosaically, we know that Rita Ora " dazzled in a low-cut jumpsuit " as she left her hotel today.
  • (15) Now, says Horne: “People here have looked at what Virgin have done on the West Coast line and are excited by the prospect of a similar transformation of services.” The image he uses is “a hotel on wheels”, adding: “There are very few commuters on this line – if people are using it, it’s because they want to, we have to impress them.” The reaction of staff and passengers at York station on Monday was more prosaic, with few changes yet visible to most except the Virgin stickers in the window, new staff badges and plastic Virgin windcheaters concealing old uniforms to keep out the snow showers.
  • (16) This song, a highlight of Prince’s live boxset One Nite Alone … is the exception, an angry horn-driven jam which Prince would perform to a somewhat prosaic video of passengers being hassled as they came through customs while intoning “You must remove your shoes” in a scary tonebox-altered Darth Vader voice.
  • (17) Can you imagine what it was like to move here in the 90s, from the land of the prosaically titled Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place, to a country where one of the most popular shows was called Drop The Dead Donkey?
  • (18) The crowd, 40,181, was the lowest by some distance since this stadium opened in 2007 and, with two shots on target all night, it was a prosaic way for England to prepare for their first Euro 2016 qualifier in Switzerland on Monday.
  • (19) But Johnson had other more prosaic work to do and there were moments when he looked less than comfortable doing it.
  • (20) The classic Rendell hallmarks were all there from the beginning – the sense of place, the delicate filleting of the characters’ psyches, the avoidance of the prosaic both in character and in motivation.