banalize

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ba·nal

(bə-năl′, bā′nəl, bə-näl′)

adj.

Drearily commonplace and often predictable; trite: "Blunt language cannot hide a banal conception" (James Wolcott).

[French, from Old French, shared by tenants in a feudal jurisdiction, from ban, summons to military service, of Germanic origin; see bhā- in Indo-European roots.]

ba·nal′ize′ v.

ba·nal′ly adv.

Usage Note: The pronunciation of banal is not settled among educated speakers of American English, and several variants compete with each other. The pronunciation (bə-năl′), rhyming with canal, was preferred by 58 percent of the Usage Panel in our 2001 survey, while 28 percent favored (bā′nəl), and 13 percent said they used (bə-näl′), a pronunciation that is more common in British English. A number of Panelists admitted to being so vexed by the word that they tended to avoid it in conversation. Nonetheless, all three pronunciations should be considered acceptable.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

banalize

(bəˈnɑːlaɪz) or

banalise

vb (tr)

to make banal

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

Translations

banalizzare

References in periodicals archive ?

Nessa direcao, a preocupacao central e de que a ampliacao defendida pelos wideners banalize conceitualmente a ideia de seguranca, podendo no limite abrir as portas a uma instrumentalizacao de meios de forca na resolucao de crises que podem escalar.

Geopolitics of Natural Resources in South America: a panorama of water resources under the view of International Security/Geopolitica dos Recursos Naturais na America do Sul: um panorama dos recursos hidricos sob a otica da Seguranca Internacional

She criticized the talk, saying that one shouldn't banalize the violence suffered by trafficking victims, and mentioned a "skill building workshop and training" about Human Trafficking that took place in Tabatinga the weekend before.

Exploring traffic and exploitation on the Brazilian international border in the Amazon

Michel-Rolph Trouillot's 1995 meditation on the tendency of Western historians to erase or banalize the cataclysmic event of the Revolution remains fresh and pertinent for historians considering the silencing of Haiti, the Holocaust, and other "unthinkable" events in world history.

Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall (ed.): Haitian History: New Perspectives

Item: Officials with the city of Paris, France, have turned down the apparel retailer H&M in its bid to build a new store on the famed Champs Elysees because it would "banalize" the street.

Retails of woe

He added: "Unfortunately, people prefer to close their eyes to a historical= fact as grave as the Holocaust and prefer to banalize the alert that I had= been preparing to show in Viradouro's parade."

Brazilian Judge Bans Holocaust Float

To the contrary it crystallizes a political form connected to a particular era." By foregrounding the newness of totalitarianism, he freely grants the possibility of differing national paths that lead to it, though he warns that reducing them to these paths is to "banalize" them.

Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia

The frequency of employing models, far from clarifying the precise meaning of a concept, has been contributing to obscure it, confuse it, and more worrying still, banalize it.

Speaking of theories and models in the accounting sciences/Falando sobre teorias e modelos nas ciencias contabeis