English is a rich language with an enormous vocabulary of words borrowed from other languages that bring to it shades of meaning you just can’t get in most other tongues.
That richness puts a lot of tools into our linguistic toolbox, but like any toolbox, you can’t get a good result if you reach blindly and grab the first thing that comes to hand.
As Mark Twain said, the difference between the almost-right word and the right word is the difference between a lightning bug and lightning.
And when a wrong word shows up, it can be startling and jarring.
A woman whose blog I visit has just such a problem with the word banal. When she and her friends get together for friendly socializing, she calls it “banal discourse.”
Here’s what Dictionary.com has to say about the word:
ba·nal
/bəˈnæl, -ˈnɑl, ˈbeɪn
l/
Show Spelled[buh-nal, -nahl, beyn-l]
–adjective
devoid of freshness or originality; hackneyed; trite: a banal and sophomoric treatment of courage on the frontier.
Judging from the context, I really doubt she means to be so insulting to her friends and herself.
The editor of my college newspaper somehow got the idea that the word dildo meant a silly or dim-witted person. She was horribly embarrassed when she learned that a dildo is an artificial erect penis. Fortunately, she never used the word in an editorial.
There’s a short copy editor’s prayer that goes, “Lord, save us from the things we think we know.”
If you’re even a little unsure about what a word means, look it up and save yourself some embarrassment.
Don’t be a dildo.
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