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Milksop   Listen
noun
Milksop  n.  A piece of bread sopped in milk; figuratively, an effeminate or weak-minded person. "To wed a milksop or a coward ape."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Milksop" Quotes from Famous Books



... I; and we will see it through in shape. The old curmudgeon! He might come as well as not if he chose. There is plenty of time to get here, and he knows her mother is gone, for I added that to the dispatch I sent, so as to insure his coming. And where is Neil, the milksop? He, at least, might come. I have no patience with the whole tribe. But we will do what we can for ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes

... open violence, it could not withstand the undermining of ridicule. My young companions, who, as I have observed, had only preceded me six months in the service, were already grown old in depravity; they laughed at my squeamishness, called me "milksop" and "boarding-school miss," and soon made me as bad as themselves. We had not quite attained the age of perpetration, but we were fully prepared to meet it ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat

... afraid of you!' he shouted; 'do you hear, milksop? I got the better of your father; I broke his horns—a warning ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev

... preferring my company to his; he was very angry with me on that account, and gave me many a hearty curse for drawing away his companions; saying, 'I ought to be d—n'd for having spoiled one of the prettiest fellows in the world, by making a milksop of him.' ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding

... 'False coward, wreak* thy wife *avenge By corpus Domini, I will have thy knife, And thou shalt have my distaff, and go spin.' From day till night right thus she will begin. 'Alas!' she saith, 'that ever I was shape* *destined To wed a milksop, or a coward ape, That will be overlad* with every wight! *imposed on Thou darest not stand ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer

... mean? Well, my dear, there was something in it, to be sure. You wouldn't have me be a milksop, would you?" ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... he'd make an exception as regards his young wife; otherwise he's little better than a milksop," cried the forester, angrily. "Above all, Regine, you must remember my stipulation. My Toni has not seen your son for two years. If he does not please her—she ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner

... was recovering. "Congratulate him for me. I didn't know the little milksop had it in him. You ought to thank Sissy, ma'am, for proving that he is not really stuffed with ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson

... Arvid; I do not fear the water—on land," said the king. "I am no such milksop as to need to dry off before a kitchen fire. See, this is the better way"; and catching up a stout hazel-stick, he bade Arvid stand on his guard. Nothing loath, Arvid Horn accepted the kingly challenge, and picking up a similar ...
— The Junior Classics • Various

... Had there been in Tom's face the faintest glimmer of regret, or the faintest trace of the old affection, he would have stayed and braved all consequences. But there was neither. The spell that bound Tom Drift, his fear of being thought a milksop, had changed him utterly, and as Charlie's eyes turned with pleading look to his they met ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed

... though, as they themselves allowed, I had the best memory of any boy in the school, and could repeat whole books from beginning to end. You know how cruelly father always used me, calling me a noodle and a milksop, just because he couldn't understand my fine nature. You know how he has made a farmer of me instead of a minister, as I ought to have been; you know it all, Jemima; and how I have borne it all, not as a woman, who whines for every touch, but as ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner

... oyster can full of coffee and a quarter ration of hardtack and sow-belly comprised the menu. If the eyes of some old soldier should light upon these lines, and he should thereupon feel disposed to curl his lip with unutterable scorn and say: "This fellow was a milksop and ought to have been fed on Christian Commission and Sanitary goods, and put to sleep at night with a warm rock at his feet;"—I can only say in extenuation that the soldier whose feelings I have been trying to describe was only a boy—and, ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell

... excellency. 'Tis a question of point of view, I'm thinking. But you'll never tell me the lad pretended one thing and did another. I'll never believe you like that milksop Chaves better." ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine

... fifteen was a bitter, lonely, and unattractive boy. Three years of Haverton House, three years of Uncle Henry's desiccated religion, three years of Mr. Palmer's athletic education and Mr. Spaull's milksop morality, three years of wearing clothes that were too small for him, three years of Haverton House cooking, three years of warts and bad haircutting, of ink and Aunt Helen's confident purging had destroyed that gusto for life ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie

... lively," was her unexpressed conclusion from her mother's dilution of her father's dilution of the ugly truth. "He's sorry and won't do it again, and—well, I'd hate a milksop. Father has forgotten that he was ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips

... yesterday from Radufalva, his best friend left him the Radufalva estate out of gratitude, because 8 years ago he gave up his fiancee with whom the friend was in love. It's true, Colonel Bruckner says that K. is a wretched milksop; but I don't think so at all; he has such fiery eyes, and looks a real Hungarian nobleman. Hella says that he used to run himself frantically into debt, because every six months he had an intimacy ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl

... been a dull one, and the only comfort he could get out of the story of it so far was that at least there was no black page in it he would like to cut out. Sally might read them all, and welcome. Their relation to her had become the point to consider. You see, at heart he was a slow-coach, a milksop, nothing of the man of the world about him. Well, her race had had a dose of the other sort in the last generation. Had the breed wearied of it? Was that Sally's ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan

... silly and tiresome. The first sight of his boy at the healthy young mother's breast seemed to him charming enough. But before long he was continually scolding Ida for her over-indulgence of the child, telling her he would grow up a milksop, always hanging ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein

... "Arthur Tremayne is a milksop, my Lord! I marvel what he means to do. His brains are but addled eggs—all stuffed with Latin ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt

... of eleven he surprised his father by telling him that he hoped to make himself "a good and useful man." And yet he was not over-serious; though, perhaps, he had little humour, he was full of fun—of practical jokes and mimicry. He was no milksop; he rode, and shot, and fenced; above all did he delight in being out of doors, and never was he happier than in his long rambles with his brother through the wild country round his beloved Rosenau—stalking the deer, admiring ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey

... milksop he would have thought me!" John laughed. "No, if he thought I was man enough to do him service, it would have been a nice thing for me to say that I ...
— For the Temple - A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem • G. A. Henty

... stamp, wavering and fickle alike in good and ill. He possessed that perseverance and purpose which go to form either the best and noblest men, or, turned to evil, the most hardy and efficient villains. Frank was no milksop. ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge

... to cry again. And suddenly Lucy was really sorry. She had done this, she had degraded her happy brother to a mere milksop, just because he had happened to plant her out, and leave her planted. Remorse suddenly gripped ...
— Oswald Bastable and Others • Edith Nesbit

... ideas. Talk about entertaining angels unaware, it ain't in it! He even cussed mild when I told him his ticket was punched for Green Lake, and he was headed for St. Ange. I never would have took him for anything but a plain milksop till he let ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock

... one to discover things all over the world. I suppose that's the class we're in now—we're the first navigators, so far as help from any one else is concerned. In Alaska a fellow has to take care of himself, and he has to learn to take his medicine. Now none of us is a milksop or ...
— The Young Alaskans • Emerson Hough

... the gentlemen over their wine and drain a bumper to our glorious 'Harry of the West,' and before I went to the Point, Sandy, I knew the best, and possibly the worst, whiskeys made in Kentucky,—we all did,—and the man or youth who could not stand his glass of liquor was looked upon as a milksop or pitied, and yet, after all, respected, as a 'singed cat,'—a fellow who owned that John Barleycorn was too much for him, and he did not dare ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King

... atmosphere of refinement, playing happily together until the boy had grown almost to dread anything common or low. His mother knew he had moral courage, and would face any issue pluckily, but his father feared he would grow up a milksop, and thought ...
— Kalitan, Our Little Alaskan Cousin • Mary F. Nixon-Roulet

... "rollicking" adventure books: not only because of their natural appeal, but because there is plenty of the other thing elsewhere, and hardly any of this particular thing anywhere. To almost anybody, for instance, except a very great milksop or a pedant of construction, Charles O'Malley with its love-making and its fighting, its horsemanship and its horse-play, its "devilled kidneys"[23] and its devil-may-care-ness, is a distinctly delectable composition; and if a reasonable interval be allowed between the readings, ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury

... Massenet's opera did little or nothing that was especially shocking to good taste or proper morals. Herod was a love-sick man of lust, who gazed with longing eyes upon the physical charms of Salome and pleaded for her smiles like any sentimental milksop; but he did not offer her Capernaum for a dance. Salome may have known how, but she did not dance for either half a kingdom or the whole of a man's head. Instead, though there were intimations that her reputation ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... give me, And it ain't to a little I'll strike. Though the tempest topgallant-mast smack smooth should smite And shiver each splinter of wood, Clear the deck, stow the yards, and house everything tight, And under reef foresail we'll scud: Avast! nor don't think me a milksop so soft, To be taken for trifles aback; For they say there's a Providence sits up aloft, To keep watch for the life of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various

... say," returned Anne. "We shall be glad to be away from Winchester, for while Peregrine Oakshott torments slyly, Sedley Archfield loves to frighten us openly, and to hurt us to see how much we can bear, and if Charley tries to stand up for us, Sedley calls him a puny wench, and a milksop, and knocks him down. But, dear madam, pray do not tell what I have said to her ladyship, for there is no knowing what Sedley would do ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge

... he, speaking unconsciously aloud, "is this the affection which she professed to bear me? Is this the proof she gives of the preference which she often expressed for her favorite son? To leave her property to that miserable milksop, my half-brother! What devil could have tempted her to this? Not Lindsay, certainly, for I know he would scorn to exercise any control over her in the disposition of her property, and as for Maria, I ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... cry-baby!" cried Kuzmitchov. "You are blubbering again, little milksop! If you don't want to go, stay behind; no one is ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... gave orders to have both doors locked, and the injunctions being promptly obeyed, he took possession of the keys himself, chuckling at the success of the stratagem. "A fair reprisal," he muttered; "this young milksop shall find he is no match for a skilful lawyer like me. Now, the ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth

... donna e immobile," in essentials and possibilities alike, forms of man, though never losing reality and possibility, pass at times out of possible or at least easy recognition. Anybody who sees in the Lancelot of the foregoing scene only a hobbledehoy and milksop who happens to have a big chest, strong arms, and plenty of mere fighting spirit, will never grasp him. Hardly better off will be he who takes him—as the story does give some handles for taking him—to be merely one of the ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury

... I am well dressed and booted. Also, I have my diversions. You see, I am not of noble blood. My father himself was not a gentleman; he and his family had to live even more plainly than I do. Nor am I a milksop. Nevertheless, to speak frankly, I do not like my present abode so much as I used to like my old one. Somehow the latter seemed more cosy, dearest. Of course, this room is a good one enough; in fact, in SOME respects it is the more cheerful and interesting of the two. ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... from head to foot. "You used to have the spirit of a man in you," she answered. "Keeping company with Regina has made you a milksop already. If you want to know what I think of Phoebe and her sweetheart—" she stopped, and snapped her fingers. "There!" she said, "that's what I think! Now go back to Regina. I can tell you one thing—she will ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins

... there some proverb about a reformed rake? I was not a rake, but I assure you I have reformed. It is better to have amused oneself for a while and have done with it. Your daughter would never care for a milksop; and I will take the liberty of saying that you would like one quite as little. Besides, between my money and hers there is a great difference. I spent my own; it was because it was my own that I spent it. And I made no debts; when it was gone I stopped. I don't owe a penny ...
— Washington Square • Henry James

... good sea-room for me, And it ain't to a little I'll strike. Though the tempest topgallant-masts smack smooth should smite, And shiver each splinter of wood,— Clear the deck, stow the yards, and house everything tight, And under reefed foresail we'll scud: Avast! nor don't think me a milksop so soft To be taken for trifles aback; For they say there's a Providence sits up aloft, To keep watch for the life ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various

... slang word usually means a milksop, but here it is equivalent to 'a butterfly', 'a weathercock'—a man of ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn



Words linked to "Milksop" :   pansy, Milquetoast, pantywaist



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