- insipid
- insipid, vapid, flat, jejune, banal, wishy-washy, inane mean devoid of qualities which give spirit, character, or substance to a thing.Something insipid is without taste, or savor, or pungency; the term is applied not only to food and drink which are so tasteless as to give no pleasure or stimulation to the palate{
insipid substitutes for coffee
}but also to persons and their utterances and ideas which strike one as thin, weak, and characterless and leave one completely indifferent{the tepid quality of the expatriate American novel, which has escaped vulgarity to become insipid instead— Connolly
}{happiness is a wine of the rarest vintage, and seems insipid to a vulgar taste— L. P. Smith
}{the insipid veracity with which Crabbe used to report some of the most trite doings of Nature and of man— Montague
}Something vapid is stale, uninteresting, or pointless because it has lost its characteristic taste, freshness, spirit, sparkle, or tang{the table beer was sour . . . the wine vapid— Smollett
}{had a genius for making the most interesting things seem utterly vapid and dead— Graves
}{we could spare a lot of the more frivolous and even vapid content of our papers— Mott
}Something flat is so vapid that it seems dead or lifeless. The word is applied chiefly to what has lost all savor, sparkle, zest, or capacity for stimulating interest or pleasure{how weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, seem to me all the uses of this world— Shak.
}{the sonnet became, in the hands of innumerable practitioners, a thing ... of artificial sentiment, flat as the lees and dregs of wine— Lowes
}{the action follows the standard interpretation of Russian history in a flat and mechanical way— Newsweek
}Something jejune is so devoid of substance or nutritive quality that it cannot satisfy the appetite; the word is only occasionally used with reference to physical hunger and is usually employed with reference to hunger of the mind or the emotions. It often connotes barrenness, aridity, or meagerness in addition to its basic implications{read through the sermon once more. It seemed more jejune than ever— Mackenzie
}{literary history without evaluative criteria becomes jejune and sterile— Glicksberg
}Something banal is so commonplace or so trite that it lacks all freshness or power to stimulate or appeal. The term often also carries one or more of such various connotations as tastelessness, pedestrianism, triviality, or platitudinousness{a simple person marvelously protected from vulgarity and the banal—T. E. Brown
}{the "poor working girl" of the banal songs of the period— Farrell
}{the average man, doomed to some banal and sordid drudgery all his life long— Mencken
}Something wishy-washy has the essential or characteristic qualities so weak or diluted that it strikes one as extremely insipid or vapid{she is too wishy-washy to attract interesting friends
}{his courage in expressing opinions that are always judicious but never wishy-washy—W. R. Crawford
}{they accepted the wishy-washy, almost meaningless, resolution— Spectator
}{Baudelaire's notion of beatitude certainly tended to the wishy-washy—T. S. Eliot
}Something inane is devoid of sense, significance, or point{to us the book seems a very inane, tiresome, and purposeless affair— Manchester Examiner
}{in order to cover his embarrassment, he made some inane remark on the weather— Conrad
}Antonyms: sapid: zestful
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.
