platitude

Noun

platitude (countable and uncountable, plural platitudes)

1. (countable) An often-quoted saying that is supposed to be meaningful but has become unoriginal or hackneyed through overuse.
   • Beauty, I suppose, opens the heart, extends the consciousness. It is a platitude, of course.1918, Algernon Blackwood, chapter XI, in The Garden of Survival
   • Semiramis was the first woman to invent eunuchs and women have had sympathy for them ever since; […] and women can tell them what they can't tell other men. And Ivor, suddenly cheered by laughing at his absurd platitudes, and finding himself by the door, was going from the room.1922, Michael Arlen, “2/1/2”, in “Piracy”: A Romantic Chronicle of These Days

   Synonyms:

   cliché, byword, saying, adage, saw, proverb, maxim, apothegm, apophthegm, dictum

2. (countable) A claim that is trivially true, to the point of being uninteresting.
   • The synthesis which he helped to effect was so successful that this aspect of his work escaped notice in the last century: all that Britomart stands for was platitude to our fathers. It is platitude no longer.1963, James R. Kreuzer, Lee Cogan, Modern Writings on Major English Authors, Ardent Media, page 109
   • After explaining myself sufficiently, I now offer my own platitude: I believe that the institution of the cabaret has the right to exist only so long as it bears the character of dilettantism and improvisation.1993, Harold B. Segel, The Vienna Coffeehouse Wits, 1890-1938, Purdue University Press, →ISBN, page 210

   Synonyms:

   truism

3. (uncountable) Flatness; lack of change, activity, or deviation.
   • The former figures the typical prairie landscape-poet who stops at the correction line (which itself literally denies the platitude of flatness) to notice the ever-present wind.1992, Ed Jewinski, Andrew Stubbs, The Politics of Art: Eli Mandel's Poetry and Criticism, page 31
   • With the photograph, we enter into flat death. One day, leaving one of my classes, someone said to me with disdain, "You talk about death very flatly." — As if the horror of Death were not precisely its platitude!2001, Elissa Marder, Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity, page 87
4. (uncountable) Unoriginality; triteness.
   • seemly platitude, flat-footed ordinariness, and well-enacted upper working class respectability cancel out any turpitude, exhilarating tension or satanic glamour a casino might be expected to have.1978, Seven Cities of Australia, page 45
   • After a passage of what we feel to be true poetry, there follows, inevitably, a passage of platitude which no critical pre-judgment can force us to admire;1984, Library of America, Edgar Allan Poe, Gary Richard Thompson, Essays and Reviews, page 71