Chrysti the Wordsmith > Radio Scripts

Some of our most banal English expressions come from fairly unlikely sources. Take namby-pamby, for instance. This epithet, meaning indecisive, weak or insipid, was actually coined in the heat of a literary feud between two respected English poets.

The leading man in this lexical drama was Ambrose Philips, born in 1679. The other player was Alexander Pope, the satirist best known for his poems An Essay on Criticism and The Rape of the Lock. Pope's ascerbic wit earned him the moniker the "Wasp of Twickenham" from the name of his birthplace in England.

In 1709, both Philips and Pope contributed poems to a popular literary publication. The Twickenham Wasp was incensed when his works were ignored, while Philips' verse received favorable reviews. The rivalry ignited a quarrel between the two which would persist for years.

It was Ambrose Philips' misfortune in this case to have written a series of sentimental rhymes for the infant child of close friends. Alexander Pope and his literary ally, Henry Carey, printed biting satires of these simple poems, referring to the writer as Namby-Pamby, a mocking baby-talk reduplication of the name Ambrose. From then on, the poet was lexically associated with insipid sentimentality, deserved or not.

Radio Script > Namby-Pamby