Pablum
Americannoun
noun
Usage
What does pablum mean? Pablum is a noun referring to ideas, speech, writing, or other media that are bland or simplistic or that lack any real intellectual substance or value. The term pablum comes directly from the brand name Pablum, which manufactured a children’s cereal known for being bland and easily digestible. Example: Celebrity news is the sort of pablum that distracts people from the actual issues happening in our world.
Explanation
Pablum refers to worthless, empty ideas. Pablum is a big load of hooey. Pablum is one of many words for ideas that are worthless, dumb, silly, and especially empty. If someone is talking and talking but not saying a whole lot, they're spewing pablum. Pablum lacks specifics and depth. Pablum was originally the name of a breakfast cereal that was soft, easy to digest, and kind of empty: just like ideas that are called pablum.
Vocabulary lists containing pablum
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Water for Elephants
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Hollow Fires
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Did they appreciate how a country girl mastered the Pablum pop idiom of the early 1950s and set it gently aflame?
From Time • Jan. 4, 2013
Pablum tarted up with tennis racquets, “16-Love” is, in a sense, the perfect movie for teenagers: you can text and tweet to your heart’s content and never miss a thing.
From New York Times • Jan. 20, 2012
First Monday in October is intellectual and ideological Pablum seasoned with a few smart Broadway-style gags.
From Time Magazine Archive
Generations of busy mothers have long blessed Mead Johnson & Co., maker of Pablum, Dextri-Maltose and a cradleful of other ready-mixes for plumping up baby.
From Time Magazine Archive
I smelt a mingling of Pablum and sour milk and salt-cod-stinky diapers and felt sorrowful and tender.
From "The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
