Namby-pamby

Your friend is a namby-pamby.

He’s ten years old now and should be able to take care of himself. If you coddle him too much, he’ll be a namby-pamby baby instead of a live boy.

[…] she was still, as heretofore, a namby-pamby milk-and-water affected creature […]

We can honestly commend the Atlantic Monthly as the most able and spirited of American periodicals, at the present time, and we like it, moreover, because it dares have opinions and to express them in unmistakable terms, on subjects which when referred to at all, by most of the current magazines, are mentioned in the gingerliest namby-pamby style of common place neutrality.

She boasts to Bentley that the Prince of Wales admires her books for the “fearless courage” of her opinions. “He said, ‘There is no namby-pamby nonsense about you – you write with a man’s pen, and I should think you would fight your enemies like a man!’ These words delighted me, for to be ‘namby-pamby’ would be a horror to me,” she writes.

Namby Pamby’s doubly Mild, Once a Man, and twice a Child; To his Hanging-Sleeves restor’d Now he foots it like a Lord; Now he Pumps his little Wits; Sh—ing Writes and Writing Sh—s,^([sic])

Another of Addison’s favourite companions was Ambrose Phillipps, a good Whig and a middling poet, who had the honour of bringing into fashion a species of composition which has been called, after his name, Namby-Pamby.

While we business men of Britain have little time for this sort of namby-pambying towards the next generation, who are often feckless, tearful, small, dirty or all of the above, there is no doubt that youths have their place in commerce.