rare. [f. prec. + -ISM.] Trivial character, triviality; something of trivial character, a triviality.
1830. H. N. Coleridge, Grk. Poets (1834), 6. It will be a matter of wonder … that such trivialisms … could ever pass for genuine poetry.
1887. C. McMillen, in The Current, IX. 3 Dec., 6/1. Sometimes one may catch the faintest shadows of trivialism, as in ‘Lamia,’ or the ‘Eve of St. Agnes.’
1895. Newcastle Courant, 7 Sept., 5/3. If playwrights intrude their unclean trivialism into social and ethical problems, it becomes the essential duty of public criticism to measure up the situation and present the thing for what it is worth.
1901. H. G. Walters, Wisdom of Passion, xiii. 143. I protest as spontaneously against the Trivialism of Howells as against the Nastiness of Zola.
