Word of the
Day for Saturday 25th January 2014
Banal \buh-NAL, -NAHL, BEYN-l\, adjective:
devoid
of freshness or originality; hackneyed; trite: a banal and sophomoric
treatment of courage on the frontier.
This
sounds almost banal, and in fact it has become banal,
thanks to the frog-like perspective of Darwin and such like.
-- Henry Miller, The Cosmological Eye, 1939
-- Henry Miller, The Cosmological Eye, 1939
The banal fact
of the existence of time, the confines that social life imposes on continuous
time - a frontier around the abstract, a limit on the unknown - brings me back
to myself.
-- Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), translated by Richard Zenith, The Book of Disquiet, published in 2010
-- Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), translated by Richard Zenith, The Book of Disquiet, published in 2010
Banal originally comes from the
French word ban which referred to compulsory military service.
Since this law applied to everyone, the word came to be associated with what
was commonplace.
Thanks to: www.dictionary.com
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