Regrettably even relatively routine banal challenges facing children have been re-interpreted as a potential source of psychological distress.
Webster was a banal, almost benign face of evil.
Like Robert Lepage before her, Paulus's distinctive talent is rendered bland and banal in the face of the Cirque machine.
To learn the hidden meaning behind the markings on the bodies of strangers is, she writes, to get a glimpse of "the mysterious and the banal, the public face and the private gesture, the strangest other and the most familiar self".
To remain shallow and banal in the face of death is perhaps the greatest sin of all.
However, given the president's penchant for mistruths and exaggeration, HuffPost could not take such a banal statement at face value.
To me, what results is an awkward, cramped, banal pastiche of tiers facing claustrophobia-inducing windows, built around a space-wasting atrium with a curved staircase more suited to a Las Vegas hotel.
Large, successful businesses could at least stick a tenner in their banal cards – because let's face it, we all still wonder, as we open our cards, whether that magic, fluttering moment will come to pass.
In "An Essay in Criticism," published in 1711 when he was twenty-two, Pope skewered writers who took the banal ring of couplets at face value: And ten low Words oft creep in one dull Line, While they ring round the same unvary'd Chimes, With sure Returns of still expected Rhymes.
Lately, my work as a journalist and activist has made me ask how we continue to affirm life in the face of such banal evil.
