This week’s theme
Food as metaphor

This week’s words
bouillabaisse
cherry-pick
rechauffe
saccharine
farrago

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A.Word.A.Day

PRONUNCIATION:

(SAK-uh-rin, -REEN, -ruhn, -ryn)

MEANING:

adjective: Excessively sweet, sentimental, or ingratiating.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Latin saccharum (sugar), from Greek sakkharon, from Sanskrit sarkara (gravel, sugar). Earliest documented use: 1674.

NOTES:

The name of the synthetic sweetening compound, saccharin, is derived from the same Latin word as today’s term. The compound was first produced in 1879, but the usage of the word saccharine goes much earlier. For example, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1841:
“One might find argument for optimism in the abundant flow of this saccharine element of pleasure in every suburb and extremity of the good world.”

USAGE:

“The most preposterous notion that Homo sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history.”
Robert A. Heinlein; Time Enough for Love; Putnam; 1973.

See more usage examples of saccharine in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: