[f. prec. + -ITY.]
1. The fact or quality of being vapid.
1721. Bailey, Vapidity, deadness, flatness, a being palled.
1771. Burke, Corr. (1844), I. 256. After a violent ferment in the nation, as remarkable a deadness and vapidity has succeeded.
1822. Examiner, 347/1. [It] threw such a gloom and vapidity over all that we never saw the beautiful opera with so little pleasure.
1863. Cowden Clarke, Shaks. Char., xx. 507. Master Froth strays from the right path from sheer vapidity.
1879. Farrar, St. Paul, II. 536, note. Surely such passages as these ought to be more than adequate to defend the Pastoral Epistles from the charge of vapidity.
2. A vapid remark, idea, feature, etc.
1848. Blackw. Mag., LXIII. 266. Their pet historian … cannot make a single speech without dragging in … some vapidity about the Revolution Settlement.
1877. C. Geikie, Christ, lv. (1879), 665. Teaching … so searching and practical, compared with the vapidities of the Rabbis.
1889. Pall Mall G., 11 May, 7. Those upon whom the crudities and vapidities of the ‘commission’ portraits … jar.
