pablum – English noun declension

English noun forms of pablum

Noun: pablum
Singularpablum
Pluralpablums

Sample Sentences

  • The juice from its hydro-power dam was needed to supply meager light to a million homes and to cook the pablum for two million brand-new babies. [1957 October, Frederik Pohl, C[yril] M. Kornbluth, “Wolfbane […]. Chapter III.”, in The Galaxy. […], volume 14, number 6, New York, N.Y.: Sheldon & Co., →OCLC, page 23, column 1:]
  • The smallest of attentions on his wife's part towards the baby […] struck him as having the nature of an affront. Clothes would have to be bought, a carriage, toys, all manner of pablums and bromides—then even larger clothes, a larger carriage, a longer bed— […] [2005, Marc Ponomareff, “[1981]”, in The House of the Dead, Lincoln, Neb.: iUniverse, →ISBN, page 67:]
  • They [tamarinds] can be used to sweeten and season foods such as: […] Cereal products—including Africa's many types of porridges, gruels, and pablums (fufu, ugali, toh, ogi, kisra, pap, couscous, and the rest). [2008, “Tamarind”, in Lost Crops of Africa, volume III (Fruits), Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, →ISBN, page 153:]
  • "If you want to be filled with pablum and tranquilizers," [Robert F.] Kennedy told crowds, "then don’t vote for me. I'm not going to give you any tired answers. […] I'm going to tell it like it is." [1971, Jules Archer, quoting Robert Francis Kennedy, “The Second Kennedy Assassination”, in 1968: Year of Crisis, New York, N.Y.: Julian Messner, →ISBN, page 94:]
  • The Republican argument today is pablum, mush and saccharine. (Which exhausts my edible metaphors.) Do Republicans really think that America's big problems are "taxes" and "trust"? Give me a cake. [1992 October 23, Ben Wattenberg, “Writer likes [Bill] Clinton”, in The Daily Sentinel, volume 43, number 128, Pomeroy; Middleport, Ohio: Multimedia, Inc., →OCLC, page 2:]
  • [Adolf] Hitler's career coincided with the growth of these tensions. He offered scapegoats, revenge, nationalism, racial superiority, and prowess at arms—pablums for a nervous people. [1996, Glen Jeansonne, “Epilogue: ‘Can We All Get Along?’”, in Women of the Far Right: The Mothers’ Movement and World War II, Chicago, Ill.; London: University of Chicago Press, →ISBN, page 188:]
  • Maybe we just don’t buy the pap, pablum and Pollyanification of the Futurama world view any longer because we are simply more sophisticated than the 1939ers. [1996 May, David Hillel Gelernter, “Prologue: The Center of Time”, in 1939, the Lost World of the Fair, New York, N.Y.: Avon Books, →ISBN, page 29:]
  • To me, these points seem bland, boring, obvious—verging on tautology or pablum. To many believers in the worldview I have described, they are either straightforward heresy or a smokescreen for some real, underlying agenda—which is identified as communism, anarchism, or, somewhat confusingly, both. [2008, James Boyle, “A Creative Commons”, in The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (A Caravan Book), New Haven, Conn.; London: Yale University Press, →ISBN, page 200:]
  • And it [the Supreme Court] will have to elaborate on Justice [Anthony] Kennedy's nausea-inducing pablum about liberty and jurisprudences of doubt. [2021 August 23, Josh Blackman, “The Volokh Conspiracy: Noah Feldman Indulges in Brett Kavanaugh Fan Fiction on Dobbs”, in Reason, Los Angeles, Calif.: Reason Foundation, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 15 Jun 2025:]
  • A few scientists greeted the hypothesis [the Gaia theory] as a thoughtful way to explain how living systems influenced the planet. Many others, however, called it New Age pablum. [2022 July 27, Keith Schneider, “James Lovelock, whose Gaia theory saw the Earth as alive, dies at 103”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 07 Jul 2025:]

Etymology

A variant of Pablum, the name of a food supplement for malnourished infants developed in 1931 by the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and Mead Johnson & Company, probably a shortening of Latin pābulum (“fodder for animals; food, nourishment”), from pā(scō) (“to feed, nourish; to drive to pasture; to support; to tend”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *peh₂- (“to protect, ward; to shepherd”)) + -bulum (suffix denoting an instrument) (from Proto-Indo-European *-dʰlom (a variant of *-trom (suffix denoting an instrument or tool))), or directly from Proto-Indo-European *peh₂-dʰlom (from *peh₂- + *-dʰlom). The name was trademarked in the United States in 1932. See: Latin Nouns 'pābulum'.