Banalize

A transitive verb meaning to make banal, to insipidify, to make tritebear.

Sitting among 9 or 10 people in the student lounge in college I, for some reason, got hung up on the word "banal." The word came up in conversation, and I think my fixation on the word came in response to the genteel way the others pronounced it: Buh-NAAL.

Sitting among friends but also among people hearing me speak for the first time I repeated that word in the spiteful, bitter way of emphasizing the BA. BAY-nul, the second syllable rounded down to sound like the word "null" got cut off before I could finish saying it -- like I swallowed the last L.

One of those people hearing me speak for the first time was a guy named Bob. I knew him only from seeing him around the place, and I thought of him as a very serious, even humorless type.

So it surprised me that he was heartily amused by my "Banal" fixation. We became pretty good friends after he remarked that he had never heard the word pronounced in such a way.

"That makes it sound like ... the worst thing you could ever be!" he said.

I remember noticing how he arrived at that phrase, at that exact wording, how he briefly trailed into ellipsis mid-sentence, rummaging for words more articulate. I sense that he settled on the relatively weak (but not quite banal) "worst thing you could ever be" to avoid sacrificing the timing of the conversation for the sake of more exquisite verbiage.

In response to Bob's comment someone else said "It's like 'anal' with a B." That might sound inappropriate in some contexts but it was all in fun at the time.

Musicians all of us, words like "banal" and "insipid" circulated in the vernacular as terms of utter disdain, but few of us had the haughty wherewithal to use the words with any sincerity. Words of such withering dismissiveness were the stuff of music critics and such whose wrath we all perhaps anticipated or dreaded at some time in our future professional lives.

Had I known about the word "Banalize" I might have morphed on that, too, first by demanding that we stop banalizing great music by playing it repeatedly, then by saying "Don't look at me with those banal eyes."

By breaking "banalize" into two words (paramecium style) I could have changed the subject to "Bette Davis Eyes" and we could banalize that song and not Tchaikowsy's Second Piano Concerto.

I don't remember the conversation ended, or if it wandered off into tangential conversations among the gathering, perhaps continuing to this day, hundreds of generations on, in unknown chatter among people who would deny any connection to me, to Bob, to the very word "banalize."