Martyn Turner write a piece on the mission of cartoonists in yesterday's Irish Times. A great read.
And he uses the word 'milquetoast', which does not appear in the Collins Dictionary.
Turner adds that he always wanted to 'get that word' into an article.
What does the word mean? Does it mean 'minimum'?
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Michael Quinion says of milquetoast:
It’s an eponym, named after a fictional cartoon character named Caspar Milquetoast, invented by the American illustrator Harold T Webster in 1924. The strip was called The Timid Soul and appeared every Sunday in the New York Herald Tribune up to his death in 1953. Mr Webster said that his character was “the man who speaks softly and gets hit with a big stick”.
The name is just a Frenchified respelling of the old American English term milk toast, an uninspiring, bland dish which was created from slices of buttered toast laid in a dish of milk, usually considered to be food for invalids. There’s an even older foodstuff, milksop, which was untoasted bread soaked in milk, likewise something suitable only for infants or the sick. From the thirteenth century on, milksop was a dismissive term for “an effeminate spiritless man or youth; one wanting in courage or manliness”, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it. Mr Milquetoast is in the same tradition.
See http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-mil1.htm
You're using the wrong dictionary, Michael! Try this one :-)
Thank you.
And Francis, that dictionary is not the only wrong book I'm using.
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