But the moment a meretricious and platitudinousethical purpose began to be read into him--how he protested against it!
Every reader of the Dreiser novels must cherish astounding specimens--of awkward, platitudinous marginalia, of whole scenes spoiled by bad writing, of phrases as brackish as so many lumps of sodium hyposulphite.
His admission to the dead Immortals must be surely the occasion for much wagging of heads, for reams of platitudinous writing on the subject of fate and its whirligig caprice.
Poussin was playing the same game, but his rhythm has been imitated by so many dull painters that we are tempted to think it as platitudinous as his drama, and that is where we are unjust to him.
Il Greco, for instance, is often as dramatically platitudinous as Guido Reni, but he also was making discoveries in design which happen to interest us now, so that we overlook his platitudes.
The statement frequently heard that "human nature is human nature" is only a platitudinous half-truth.
The "old favorites" are almost all platitudinous in thought and monotonous in rhythm.
I never did share the platitudinous belief in propinquity.
And one by one with relentless clarity she stripped bare all those platitudinous precepts that she had inherited, had accepted, as one accepts the physical facts of the world.
We also see why a valuable means for the discovery of truth is given by the inversion of platitudinous implications.
It is almost platitudinous to quote Herodotus' remark that the invention of geometry was necessary because of the floods of the Nile, which washed away the boundaries and changed the contours of the fields.
All this is soplatitudinous that I feel ashamed to write it; but then, how can one avoid platitudes without avoiding truth?
Nevertheless Martin liked him better than the platitudinous bank cashier.
