What is banality in language?
Ans. The word ‘banality‘ broadly means linguistic tradition or convention handed down from the past or the pre decessors to the writers and poets of posterity in a particular age. No creative writer can escape this banality completely. At the same time, no creative writer can rest satisfied with what, he gets as a tradition. He makes experiments with the new.
The successful resultant work of his experiments is regarded as his originality. Tradition and originality are two contrary forces; but they go together. Tradition or banality has two dimensions-one is the age-worn undistinguished poetic or linguistic style of the poet and the other is the adherence to the ordinary or common-place style of the contemporary language. The proneness to the ordinary or common-place contemporary language for revitalization of the language of poetry is also another kind of linguistic banality.