milksop

Related to milksop: Milktoast

milksop

1. adjective Extremely weak, timid, or ineffectual. We're going to be the laughingstock of the world after such a milksop response from our government. We can't afford some milksop plan that just keeps the status quo—we need something drastic and daring that might really improve our sales. In the play, the hero returns to drive the milksop suitor from his home and reclaim his rightful place by his wife's side.
2. noun An extremely weak, timid, or ineffectual man. We need a president who's going to lead the nation with strength and resolve, not some milksop who'll just kowtow to every foreign leader who raises his voice. I swear, I don't know why I ever married a milksop like you. You can't even defend your own wife when she's been insulted!
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.
See also:
  • milktoast
  • milquetoast
  • bulletproof
  • point-blank
  • appropriate for
  • everything is copacetic
  • tread tackie
  • SBD
  • as good, well, etc. as the next person
  • as the next person
References in periodicals archive
Sam was a dreamy milksop, who nevertheless volunteered for the South.
We wanted a ruggedly masculine type, not a Dresden-fragile milksop with a girlish peaches-andcream complexion.
In the end, Traverse is not "obviously a sissy" or a "milksop" (208), as Alfred Habegger declares, but, according to Southworth's narrator, a "young Paladin" to Capitola's "Chevalier Bayard" (425, 351).
Not a milksop. To govern a country like Russia or others, one must have character, willpower, the courage to make a decision and assume the responsibility for it, or get out.
A weakling is a "milk toast," or as Roosevelt himself once wrote, a "milksop." He also once used the phrase "emasculated milk-and-water moralities" to condemn eastern elitism as opposed to western manly virtue.
In stark contrast to these champagne-sipping mirages, we soon encounter Susan's corporeal husband, Gerald (Fred D' Angelo), a milksop parish vicar who would rather spend his time writing his 60-page treatise on the history of the parish dating back to 1386, than attending to Susan's physical and emotional needs.
For Trollope, Fielding was the more preferable "sinner" to Richardson's "saint among novelists" (94); while Fielding, writes Tackeray, "couldn't do otherwise than laugh at the puny cockney bookseller, pouring out endless volumes of sentimental twaddle, and hold him up to scorn as a mollcoddle and a milksop.[...] Richardson's goddess was attended by old maids and dowagers, and fed on muffins and bohea" (95).
Meanwhile my parents pressure me: "You are just a milksop. Can't you stand up for yourself?
Authorities ranging from John Wilkes to Lord Hailsham have pretended that liberty dates from 'the Glorious Revolution', a milksop affair neither glorious nor revolutionary, which retrieved from the end of the Stuart kings some of the gains made in 1649.
He feels stifled in Rouen and cannot wait to escape to Paris, yet whenever anyone asks him how he likes it, he returns his ritual reply: "It's the sort of town I'd like to settle down in." When he first arrives in Rouen, he spends every ounce of his energy to keep up his tense smiling (22), and from that point forward the image he presents to the French is that of a smiling, nodding milksop, hands clasped in front of him, mouthing what the French want to hear.
Wink's interpretation of the New Testament is that Jesus was not a pacifist milksop but (among other things) was encouraging people to resist the dominant power system of the era, that being the Roman Empire.
But it has been the British way to ignore the Republic, to deplore the prosecution of the King and to pretend that liberty dates from what is dubbed 'the Glorious Revolution' of 1689--a milksop affair neither glorious nor revolutionary, which merely retrieved from the fall of the Stuart kings some of the gains made in 1649.
Milksop. That's what editorials have become in the age of the editorial board.
This superb actor (singer and dancer) has Suzanne Carley as his Sandy -the well known milksop. In terms of talent these two performers are miles apart, but their singing duos are neatly accomplished.
She constantly assails him with contemptuous words, calling him at different times a "worm," "Milksop!" and a "Chickenheart"; and after he has been beaten to a pulp defending her, she barely blinks, asking condescendingly, "Did the baby get beaten up?" Tendulkar never really shows why Bapu invests in a one-sided friendship, leaving the audience with a skeleton of a friendship that seems only to serve the purpose of reducing complex emotions to an essentialized critique of patriarchal society.