In the daytime these mysterious Paul Reveres of misty nights become prosaic men on plodding ponies, waving red flags.
More seriously, it has ensured that drinking remains subversive and therefore attractive at an age when it should have become prosaic.
These professionals can experience life and death decisions, serious illness and trauma every day of their lives; the familiar can become prosaic and commonplace; but for the patients and families these situations are uniquely shocking and unfamiliar, and they are desperate for support, empathy and acknowledgement.
Take that dream away, and the season becomes a prosaic slog for 40-odd points prised off fellow strugglers.
Now that lasers are found in everything from telephone cables to DVD players to the humble laser pointer, they have become almost prosaic.
There was not enough symphonic momentum to connect individual moments together, and Tchaikovsky's symphonic hymn to the power of fate became a prosaic experience.
"The digital realm has become pretty prosaic and I think all the poetry is in analogue space," he says.
Like too many horror pictures, "The Messengers" becomes more boringly prosaic as it goes along, and there's an 11th-hour plot twist so dumb and poorly articulated that it destroys the movie.
Almost as if a switch had been thrown, inhibitions evaporate and the scene, in its commingling of the sexual and the prosaic, becomes surreal, the suburbs as they might be perceived through the lens of a David Lynch.
But too often, group work becomes predictably repetitive and prosaic, and she has a tendency to build the dancing to a frenzied level and then let her pieces trail off, as she does in "Spontaneous Combustion" and the concluding fun of "Ode to the '60s".
