What's the difference between banal and vapid?

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.

Vapid


Definition:

  • (a.) Having lost its life and spirit; dead; spiritless; insipid; flat; dull; unanimated; as, vapid beer; a vapid speech; a vapid state of the blood.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Beyond that, MSNBC devotes three hours each morning to a show hosted by a former rightwing GOP congressman and his cavalcade of vapid "centrist" establishment journalists such as Mark Halperin (then again, Fox features the idiosyncratic and unpredictable Shepard Smith each night).
  • (2) She comes across as vapid and totally uncouth without a bit of finesse about her.
  • (3) Greece Aligned to Eurovision's Balkan Bloc Not only is Saki Rouvas's This is Our Night marvellously, teeth-grindingly, competition-winningly vapid, but more importantly, Greece is the epicentre of the many-tentacled Balkan Bloc.
  • (4) The exhibition content is, in the main, as vapid as the architecture is extravagant.
  • (5) "I used to think that focusing on the visual aspect was really vapid and ridiculous too," she admits, "but I've come to realise it's actually one of the most powerful tools I have to work with.
  • (6) Since then, while some mainstream rap has veered to the materialistic and misogynistic, there have always been successful rappers who have rallied against the vapid.
  • (7) For while humanists work hard to create new ceremonies, many find them vapid.
  • (8) She zeited the geist of the mid-90s superbly, but Bridget, never trying be too strident (offputting to men) was for me the epitome of post-feminism – vapid, consumerist and self-obsessed.
  • (9) Vapid and sexless, pop was little more than a Smash Hits remake of American Bandstand three decades earlier.
  • (10) He may look vapid sometimes for Chelsea but he has scored nine goals in Europe and there are only two players, Cristiano Ronaldo and Robert Lewandowski, with more this season.
  • (11) For the majority, however, the primary concern is not vapid rhetoric, nor even resentment about expenses fiddling, which parts of the media have now elevated above substantive policy arguments for years.
  • (12) For Brazil, there was also the added satisfaction of seeing Fred, who has been the subject of so much criticism following his vapid displays against Croatia and Mexico, get on the scoresheet.
  • (13) In his thoughtful demeanour seems to be an implicit criticism of the vapidity of today's world.
  • (14) Nobody has been subjected to these vapid discrediting techniques more than Noam Chomsky.
  • (15) It's said by a really vapid character who we're not meant to like.
  • (16) Facebook Twitter Pinterest Game of Thrones: spectacular but vapid.
  • (17) As one of their champions, Bono, recently put it in the New York Times , their music "contains all the big themes and ideas that make all around them seem so vapid".
  • (18) And indeed, see what happened in 2008 when Politico's own Mike Allen interviewed George Bush with questions so vapid and reverent that it would have shamed his profession if it were capable of that.
  • (19) United did not play anywhere close to their top level but they did not have to when their opponents were so vapid.
  • (20) Vapid passages can be forgiven if they are followed by substance.