Inane

 WORD OF THE DAY

inane / adjective/ i-ˈnān  

Definition
1a: lacking significance, meaning, or point
1b: silly
2: empty, insubstantial
3: void or empty space

Examples
All around us swirls the battering of gargantuan films, Styrofoam epics with megatons of special effects, gleefully inane adolescent films, horror films that really are horrible.
— Stanley Kauffmann, New Republic, 15 Mar. 2004

The surfeit of home runs is a sop to all the Philistines who require inane diversions like programmed races between electronic dots on the scoreboard to make it through a two-hit shutout.
— Nicholas Dawidoff, New York Times Magazine, 4 Apr. 1999

Frank repeatedly shouted down the playoff music in an increasingly rude manner, awkwardly overstaying his welcome on stage for an inane speech that had little to say.
— Kelly Lawler, USA TODAY, 20 Sep. 2021

Ken Jeong mugging his way through some inane prop comedy before announcing the Variety Sketch Series award?
— Kristen Baldwin, EW.com, 20 Sep. 2021

Did You Know?
The adjective "inane" is now most commonly encountered as a synonym of "shallow" or "silly."
But when this word first entered the English language in the early 17th century, it was used to mean "empty" or "insubstantial."
It was this older sense that gave rise, in the latter half of the 17th century, to the noun "inane," which often serves as a poetic reference to the void of space ("the illimitable inane," "the limitless inane," "the incomprehensible inane").
This noun usage has not always been viewed in a favorable light.
Samuel Johnson, in his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), says of "inane" that "it is used licentiously for a substantive," which in current English means that it is used as a noun without regard to the rules.