the.com/bromide
A soothing cliché prescribed like a sedative, because it once literally was one.
means A trite, worn-out saying trotted out to soothe or placate, especially one so predictable it numbs rather than comforts.
from From bromine, the element — in the 1800s, potassium bromide salts were widely prescribed as sedatives for anxiety, insomnia, and even epilepsy. By the early 1900s, 'bromide' had drifted from the medicine cabinet into language itself: a dull, calming platitude that dulls the mind the way the drug dulled the nerves. The writer Gelett Burgess helped cement the figurative sense in a popular 1906 book that cast 'bromides' as walking clichés — people whose every remark was a tranquilizing commonplace.
- origin
- Potassium bromide was a 19th-century sedative drug
- metaphor shift
- Dull platitude sense arrived by early 1900s
- chemistry
- Technically any compound of bromine plus another element
- irony
- The drug calmed nerves, the phrase just numbs conversation