Word: milquetoasts
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Millions of Americans know Caspar Milquetoast as well as they know Tom Sawyer and Andrew Jackson, better than they know George F. Babbitt, and any amount better than they know such world figures as Mr. Micawber and Don Quixote. They know him, in fact, almost as well as they know their own weaknesses...
...Touch of Venus. Mary Martin in an unhackneyed musical about a statue of Venus that comes to life and pursues a Milquetoast (TIME...
When mild-looking Victor Krulak was graduated from the Naval Academy in 1934 he was the smallest man in his class. He had a long Milquetoast nose, soft reddish hair, one constantly surprised eyebrow, and a solid reputation for whimsical understatement. Inevitably, he was called "The Brute." Last week, as a lieutenant colonel of the Marines, back from a brush with the Japs on Choiseul Island, The Brute was in line for a Navy Cross. His Marine paratroopers had harried and jabbed the Jap for a week, killed at least 144, wounded uncounted others...
World War I pulled him off the farm again. He went to France a lieutenant, became captain of the 129th Field Artillery's rough-&-tumble Battery D. He was shy, reserved, wore big shell-rimmed glasses: to his pugnacious Irish privates he looked like something of a milquetoast. At the start he was perhaps the most unpopular captain in France. But he led his men doggedly through St. Mihiel and the Argonne, spiked a panic when German artillery once drew a bead on his battery, lost only one soldier killed and one wounded, was promoted to major...
Aside from the fact that it was an ill-chosen word, "Milquetoast" does not need "meek and mild" as modifiers; it includes those two adjectives, plus...