Pabulum
Beautiful World, deliver us from Sally Rooney
pabulum
pab-yoo-lum
noun
Anything that is insipid, unstimulating, or lacking in intellectual depth.
I try not to be a snob. I try to cleave as best I can to the idea that I should let people enjoy things, and that there’s no accounting for taste. Then I take a browse through what might be described as ‘Book Social Media’, my eyes roll so far into the back of my head they may never face forward again, and I remember that 98% of all the books written these days are crap, and the people who like them are dribbling simpletons. I am, alas, a snob to my core.
And is that same snobbery that forms the core of this week’s word, which is almost always used nowadays to dismiss things that are insipid, flavourless and unchallenging. Think Love Island, or the collected works of the mimsy milquetoast Sally Rooney. Such things are deserving of the epithet ‘pabulum’.
The word sounds suitably Latin in origin, and so it proves to be, with the ultimate root of the word being the Latin verb ‘pascere’, meaning ‘to feed’. Originally the word was used to refer to the sort of food or fertiliser that one might give to pigs or use to nourish a field, but has since expanded to include any sort of consumable, be it food, media, or even ideas themselves.