(a.) Mild; soft; gentle; smooth and soothing in manner; suave; as, a bland temper; bland persuasion; a bland sycophant.
(a.) Having soft and soothing qualities; not drastic or irritating; not stimulating; as, a bland oil; a bland diet.
Example Sentences:
(1) For further education, this would be my priority: a substantial increase in funding and an end to tinkering with the form of qualifications and bland repetition of the “parity of esteem” trope.
(2) Reoperation was more frequent after valve replacement with bioprostheses (6.7% per patient year) than after valvuloplasty (4.3% per patient year) and after mechanical valve replacement (1.5% per patient year; P less than 0.02), and was necessitated mainly by residual or recurrent valve dysfunction after valvuloplasty, bland or infected periprosthetic leaks in mechanical valves and degradation of bioprostheses.
(3) "Everyone calls him the Socialist Worker Padre," one bland senior cleric told me with a sly and dismissive laugh.
(4) ABNORMALITIES OF THE CERVICAL EPITHELIUM ARE SET OUT IN TWO MAIN GROUPS: bland lesions which are regarded as unrelated to malignancy, and malign lesions which are considered as potential precursors of invasive carcinoma.
(5) Embolization with avitene, PVA and ethanol induced a more bland histological reaction than the one observed with IBCA.
(6) Sir Christopher Bland, the former BBC chairman, told the BBC News channel the allegations were "very serious" but warned against jumping to conclusions about Rippon stepping aside.
(7) Among pro-independence people there are widespread concerns that if the SNP moves too quickly on a referendum it will cast the choice in the often bland New Labour-ish terms it uses for everyday politics – and thus deprive Scotland of a crucial opportunity to discuss its future, as well as threatening their chances of winning.
(8) But blandness in public should not be mistaken for blandness of character, and there are signs that she is beginning to emerge from the passive role she has been playing.
(9) Most examples measure less than or equal to 0.5 cm and are composed of a partially encapsulated mass of bland Schwann cells and innumerable tiny axons arranged in interlacing fascicles.
(10) His neutralisation strategy has amounted to little more than bland statements of support and efforts to keep the NHS out of the news.
(11) He is a regular panellist on comedy news quizzes, and reaches for Wodehouse in depicting 70s foreign secretary Lord Home "playing Lord Emsworth to Heath's Empress of Blandings".
(12) Pathologic examination of the orbital breast metastases revealed two types: an adenocarcinomatous pattern with nests of pleomorphic malignant appearing cells and a histiocytoid variant with bland, large cells similar to histiocytes.
(13) Unfortunately, the commercials are so bland and empty that they’re almost certainly doomed to failure.
(14) Much of the time he sounds bland, monotonal, bobbing gently along.
(15) The frequency of major events during follow-up (thromboembolism, anticoagulant related hemorrhage, bland perivalvular leak and prosthetic valve endocarditis) were similar, but the frequency of primary tissue valve failure was markedly different for the two valves (1.1% per patient-year for Ionescu-Shiley valves and 5.9% for the Hancock valve).
(16) A bland vasculopathic process resulting from metabolic or immunologic disturbances appears to be the best explanation for this new syndrome, which has previously been recognized only in Japan.
(17) The anomalous origin of the left coronary artery from the pulmonary artery (Bland-White-Garland Syndrome) is a rare congenital malformation reported to occur in 0.25-0.5% of all congenital cardiac anomalies.
(18) He recommends not a bland and stimulus-free environment, but one whose elements are unobtrusive and unambiguous.
(19) David Bell will be online this afternoon at 4.15pm to answer your points at www.EducationGuardian.co.uk Changing faces of Ofsted Stewart Sutherland 1992-1994 Sutherland was criticised for a slow start and bland inspections.
(20) Two deceptively benign-appearing, unclassifiable but very similar fibromyxoid sarcomas characterized histologically by bland, innocuous-appearing fibroblastic cells and a swirling, whorled growth pattern are presented.
Ruthless
Definition:
(a.) Having no ruth; cruel; pitiless.
Example Sentences:
(1) AB InBev has cut costs ruthlessly as it has bought up companies around the world, including Anheuser-Busch, the brewer of US beer Budweiser.
(2) As Greece pleads with its eurozone creditors for more time in meeting its fiscal adjustment targets, Dombrovskis is a fierce champion of surgical austerity applied quickly and ruthlessly.
(3) Rather than ruthlessly efficient, I have found them sweet and a bit hopeless."
(4) This thread ran through his later writings, which focused particularly on questions of the transformation of work and working time, envisaging the possibility that the productivity gains made possible by capitalism could be used to enhance individual and social life, rather than intensifying ruthless economic competition and social division.
(5) "Sometimes a handshake is just a handshake, but when the leader of the free world shakes the bloody hand of a ruthless dictator like Raúl Castro , it becomes a propaganda coup for the tyrant," said Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Republican Congress member in Florida, told the US secretary of state, John Kerry.
(6) But Hilton insists critics are wrong to see the group as ruthless youngsters who meet purely to further their own careers.
(7) This is how powerful a hold it has over them.” Mossino, who works with refugees and asylum seekers as well as victims of trafficking, says that in the past decade the trade in Nigerian women has become a hugely profitable and ruthless criminal industry, controlled largely by Nigerian gangs that took root in Italy in the 1980s.
(8) On 12 September 1980, the head of the military, Kenan Evren, sent tanks rolling through the streets of the Turkish capital and installed a ruthless military government.
(9) The "consultation" and "informed consent" the reports insist must take place before the project goes ahead are a sick joke in a region in which dissent is ruthlessly crushed and people are imprisoned and tortured simply for speaking their own language.
(10) She is also waiting to hear if she has won a second Olivier award, this time for her role as the ruthless Hollywood agent in The Little Dog Laughed, the play that transferred from Broadway to the West End last year.
(11) A boss on some astronomic pay packet may be held back by shame from paying his cleaners too little relative to that, but emotion will not get in the way of ruthlessness if the process all takes place behind the veil of some corporate contract.
(12) "What is clear is that they are as ruthless as any Islamist group or terrorists anywhere in the world," said Antony Goldman, a west Africa risk analyst at London-based PM Consulting.
(13) The often confusing circumstances that led to their courts martial and the ruthlessness of their punishments only fully came to light with the publication in 1989 of Julian Putkowski and Julian Sykes's history Shot at Dawn .
(14) If there was reason to be worried following five successive defeats, their worst run of the century, they showed no sign of panic during a ruthless attacking performance which guarantees they will spend Christmas in the top six.
(15) She was ambitious, and Colonel Gaddafi has always promoted ruthless people.
(16) Every couple of years, evidence emerges to underline the unparalleled nature of the state onslaught and ruthless rule-breaking to overcome resistance in the mining communities, bought at a cost of £37bn in today's prices .
(17) The footage underscores the ruthlessness of fighting in Pakistan's border areas, where the army has also faced allegations of massacres.
(18) Philip French championed Boyle's career from the outset, describing his debut feature film, Shallow Grave , as "a good piece of storytelling... Hitchcock would have admired its ruthlessness and cruel humour."
(19) In the past decade, European migration was used as a sort of 21st-century incomes policy in Britain as employers ruthlessly exploited migrant labour to hold down wages – which have since been cut in real terms for four years in a row as a result of the crisis.
(20) But we can all probably do without Fifa's "fair play in marketing" lectures, which clothe commercial ruthlessness in the language of sporting decency, apparently oblivious to the impression given by wallpapering every stadium with signs that push BP or declare "We proudly accept only Visa".