Milk-and-wateriness
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The condition of being milk-and-watery; mawkishness; insipidness. uncountable
"There is (at any rate in modern days) a mawkish milk-and-wateriness about the Christian attitude, and also a painful self-consciousness, which is not pleasant; and though Nietzsche's blonde beast is a sufficiently disagreeable animal, one almost thinks that it were better to be that than to go about with one's head meekly hanging on one side, and talking always of altruism and self-sacrifice, while in reality one's heart was entirely occupied with the question of one's own salvation."
Example
More examples"There is (at any rate in modern days) a mawkish milk-and-wateriness about the Christian attitude, and also a painful self-consciousness, which is not pleasant; and though Nietzsche's blonde beast is a sufficiently disagreeable animal, one almost thinks that it were better to be that than to go about with one's head meekly hanging on one side, and talking always of altruism and self-sacrifice, while in reality one's heart was entirely occupied with the question of one's own salvation."
Etymology
From milk-and-watery + -ness.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.