(n.) Something commonplace, hackneyed, or trivial; the commonplace, in speech.
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.
Mediocrity
Definition:
(n.) The quality of being mediocre; a middle state or degree; a moderate degree or rate.
(n.) Moderation; temperance.
Example Sentences:
(1) The interobserver variability of these indices is low (r greater than 0.96); reproducibility is good in patients with sinus rhythm but mediocre in atrial fibrillation.
(2) Only a few weeks ago he described English education as “mediocre”.
(3) This is a community where readers' patience for mediocrity is measured in seconds not minutes," added Thomson, the former Times editor who moved to New York to run the WSJ at the end of 2007 following Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of the paper's publisher, Dow Jones.
(4) The hospital laboratory was asked to provide for diffractometric analysis samples of the "mediocre" semens of quality similar enough to the "control" ones what concerns the percentage of motile spermatozoa (40 percent) and spermatozoan concentration.
(5) The unprecedented stimuli provided by central banks has kept activity ticking over, but proved unable to lift the global economy out of what Lagarde calls “the new mediocre”.
(6) I'm sure that advisers are at fault: mediocre people with PR degrees, eagerly advising on how to avoid the resentment of the masses.
(7) The value of conventional non-invasive methods is limited by a high failure rate (standard echocardiography in patients with chronic respiratory disease), a mediocre sensitivity, notably in detecting moderate PAH (electrocardiography, radiography of the chest, myocardial thalium scintigraphy) or a poor specificity (isotopic angiography).
(8) From the endocrine point of view, the mediocre prognosis is aggravated by high energy radiotherapy.
(9) The mediocre results among the group of inoperable patients suggest that other chemotherapy protocols need to be tested.
(10) This grid, used for the analysis of 527 randomized trials, showed that about one-half of them were of mediocre quality, the most frequent defects encountered being the multiplicity of assessment criteria, the lack of description of the subjects excluded, the absence of calculation of the number of subjects required before starting the trial and the small number of subjects in trials with non-significant results.
(11) Negative and mediocre results were more frequent in cases of gonarthrosis.
(12) Its contribution is obviously essential when, for technical reasons, arterial opacification is only mediocre (extended angiocardiopneumography).
(13) Stock Woolstencroft , architects of the dismal Stratford towers, are attempting to continue their march of mediocrity with schemes on the other side of the park.
(14) All the interviews supported the notion of an arbitrary norm for pay, which almost all firms felt was grossly and inappropriately high … The general view of search firms is that a lower norm would not materially affect what happens.” One headhunter said: “I think there are an awful lot of FTSE 100 CEOs who are pretty mediocre.” Another added: “I think that the wage drift over the past 10 years, or the salary drift, has been inexcusable, incomprehensible, and it is very serious for the social fabric of the country.” The findings are being made public just as an analysis by the High Pay Centre thinktank shows that the average pay of a chief executive – including pensions, share options and bonuses – stands at about £4.6m.
(15) A mediocre succession of atria and galleries, it does at least give artists space.
(16) Such has been the generally mediocre standard of Woods' play over the last two years, he has had perhaps only half a dozen realistic chances of winning on Sunday afternoon.
(17) This would happen especially if the school inspectorate Ofsted found they were failing, mediocre, fragile or coasting.
(18) For the svengali of mediocrity decreed that every year would culminate in the release of a single from the winner of his X Factor, and that this contribution to the lexicon would dutifully top the charts.
(19) Chemicals on the loop were Ca (abundant); Mg (marked); Si (mediocre); Ab, Ba, Fe (insignificant); Mn, Mo, Zn, P (trace).
(20) While the Lakers' two-year contract extension may end up being "an expensive mediocrity overpaying a franchise star in decline", as Grantland's Zach Lowe has put it , it could also have very well been the only move it could have sold to its fans.