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Pabulum   Listen
noun
pabulum  n.  
1.
The means of nutriment to animals or plants; food; nourishment.
Synonyms: comestible, edible, eatable, victual, victuals.
2.
Hence: That which feeds or sustains, such as fuel for a fire; especially, That upon which the mind or soul is nourished; intellectual sustenance; as, intellectual pabulum.
Synonyms: food for thought, intellectual nourishment.
3.
Trite or simplistic writing, sentiments, etc.; pablum (3).






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Pabulum" Quotes from Famous Books



... this class, a young lady at school, considering that the word "eat" was too vulgar for refined ears, is said to have substituted the following: "To insert nutritious pabulum into the denticulated orifice below the nasal protuberance, which, being masticated, peregrinates through the cartilaginous cavities of the larynx, and is finally domiciliated in ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate

... group before us has research possibilities not a few. The question of their nutrition and its limits in respect of variety, is yet to be solved. From present indications all that can be said is to the effect that a pabulum similar in variety, no doubt meets the needs of many species. Whether in artificial culture a single base as gelatin or agar would suffice for all or several is yet to ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride

... This is all they live for. In those days"—his voice sank; he had plainly forgotten that he was not alone—"when men had no universal conceptions, they would have done well to look at the trees. Instead of fostering a number of little souls on the pabulum of varying theories of future life, they should have been concerned to improve their present shapes, and thus ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... the windows were alight, and this building too shook beneath the force which there was no escaping. Its frame, to be sure, stood bravely up, and after the fire was still to be seen, almost intact, a tribute to its maker and design; but its contents, alas, were not fireproof, and proved pabulum most welcome to the element which welcomed almost ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble

... they first ate and read in it, they conceived and began to embody the idea of developing the hollow into a house. Foraging long ago in their father's library for mental pabulum, they had come upon Belzoni's quarto, and had read, with the avidity of imaginative boys, the tale of his discoveries, taking especial delight in his explorations of the tombs of the kings in the rocks of Beban el Malook: these it was ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald

... prope fame absumptis; nuda enim fere cacumina sunt, et, si quid est pabuli, obruunt nives. Inferiora valles apricosque quosdam colles habent rivosque prope silvas et iam humano cultu digniora loca. Ibi iumenta in pabulum missa, et quies {20} muniendo fessis hominibus data. Triduo inde ad planum descensum iam et ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce

... 'that Trypho emeritus,' and as 'one of the honestest men living, to whom, as a bookseller, learning is under considerable obligations.' Beloe, in his 'Sexagenarian,' states that at Tom Payne's and at Peter Elmsley's, in the Strand, 'a wandering scholar in search of pabulum might be almost certain of meeting Cracherode, George Steevens, Malone, Wyndham, Lord Stormont, Sir John Hawkins, Lord Spencer, Porson, Burney, Thomas Grenville, Wakefield, Dean Dampier, King of Mansfield Street, Towneley, Colonel Stanley,' and others. Savage ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts

... are now recognized as playing their part in predisposing to the action of the true causal agent, viz. the bacterium. In health the blood and internal tissues are bacterium-free; after death they offer a most suitable pabulum for various bacteria; but between these two extremes lie states of varying liability to infection. It is also probable that in a state of health organisms do gain entrance to the blood from time to time and are rapidly killed off. The circumstances ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... the poetical student than those who have laboured in kindred “fields of literature.” Indeed, we do not so much blame the editors of such books as we blame the public, whose coarse and vulgar mouth is always agape for such pabulum. The writer of this review possesses an old circulating-library copy of a book containing some letters of Coleridge. One page, and one only, is greatly disfigured by thumb marks. It is the page on which appears, not some precious hint as to the conclusion of ‘Christabel,’ but a domestic ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton

... living matter; it is structureless, semi-fluid, transparent and colorless. It is the only matter that can grow, move, divide itself and multiply, the only matter that can take up pabulum (food) and convert it into its own substance; and is the only matter that can be nourished. The bioplasm in the cell gets its nourishment by drawing in of the pabulum through the cell wall, and ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen



Words linked to "Pabulum" :   tuck, intellectual nourishment, victuals, food, comestible, food for thought, victual, edible, eatable



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