He began to realize the emotion, and the loneliness, behind the banality of what she had said; he was ashamed of himself to have answered as if it were merely banal.

Arendt ... envisioned even the extreme evil which produced the Holocaust as merely banal [in Eichmann in Jerusalem].

For him, the road is not sinister; it is merely banal.

The absence of scenery and properties and the exploitation of the stage as stage both permit the cliched dialogue and prevent it from being merely banal.

For the most part, the film oscillates between the good and the merely banal".

As formal photographs, seen across nearly a century of surrealism, they succeed where, say, the fairy pictures that Arthur Conan Doyle famously endorsed don't, the fakery of the fairies being merely banal.

On their own terms, Brel's songs - the best, the merely banal and the unbearable - and these previously unsung ones fall mostly into the last two categories.

We have become so habituated to market relations that it can seem merely banal to observe that types of work which make a loss will, within market production, be reduced or discontinued, while types which make a profit will be expanded.