I utilized the word Milquetoast a day or two ago to depict an individual who is unmotivated, irresolute, and detached in their overall demeanor. I was addressed on the genuine meaning and beginning of the word. Am I utilizing it accurately? What is its genuine meaning, and where does the term come from?
A You’re not exactly there. The standard spelling is milquetoast, yet said the same way as your spelling. What’s more, the standard sense is that of a bashful or submissive, unassertive. individual is hesitant or easygoing, unassertive. Such individuals may seem indifferent or unmotivated, yet that is not the justification their hushing up.
Also read: Schediaphilia
It’s an eponym, named after an anecdotal animation character named Caspar Milquetoast, created by the American artist Harold T Webster in 1924. The strip was known as The Bashful Soul and showed up each Sunday in the New York Envoy Tribune up to his demise in 1953. Mr Webster said that his person was “the one who talks delicately and gets hit with a major stick”.
The name is only a Frenchified respelling of the old American English term milk toast, an unacceptable, dull dish which was made from cuts of buttered toast laid in a dish of milk, typically viewed as nourishment for invalids. There’s a much more established food item, pantywaist, which was untoasted bread absorbed milk, similarly something reasonable just for babies or the debilitated. From the thirteenth century on, pantywaist was a cavalier term for “a delicate spiritless man or youth; one needing in boldness or masculinity”, as the Oxford English Word reference puts it. Mr Milquetoast is in a similar practice.
