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Reader question: Please explain “pedestrian” in this sentence: A rather pedestrian effort is made to achieve this objective. My comments: It means people are trying to achieve their goal without exerting themselves, that is, without working too hard. Pedestrian here is an adjective, not a noun. In other words, it has nothing to do with the pedestrian in the street, someone walking on foot. However, we might as well use the walking analogy to understand “pedestrian” as the adjective. In comparison with jogging and running, walking takes the least effort. Jogging takes more. Running full speed, on the other hand, you’ll be out of breath in a matter of seconds. In short, the pedestrian pace is slow and commonplace – after all, pedestrians are the most commonplace scene in the street. Walking is something we do everyday. Walking in the street, unless you’re Brad Pitt or Jennifer Lopez, is nothing special, nothing exciting, nothing to set other people’s pulses racing. Hence figuratively speaking, anything pedestrian is common, average, dull, ordinary, unexceptional, undistinguished, unimaginative, unexciting, unremarkable, etc and so forth. In fact, you can replace “pedestrian” with any one or more of the above adjectives in the following examples from the media: 1. a rather pedestrian (ordinary, dull, unexciting) merger game: | 
