Thing To Do Today: be soppy.

Soppy can mean more or less the same as soggy, that is wet through to the point of dripping or oozing. This is fine if you like that sort of thing.

Perhaps you're an Olympic swimmer. Or a sponge.

Soppy can also mean containing sops, a sop in this case being a piece of dunked bread (though sops-in-wine is, confusingly, a sort of flower):


photo by Jelonowitz

On the same principle, a milksop may be bread soaked in, yes, milk, but it's far more likely to be a feeble or ineffectual man. 

This brings us to the sort of soppy I particularly recommend.

My Collins dictionary tells me that this sort of soppy is a purely British word (though it isn't in my edition of the Oxford English Dictionary). It means emotionally saturated. It's the sort of feeling you get when you see an appealing young animal, the emotional response you feel when you think about the television of your youngest years, or the internal gooeyness that makes you hesitate about throwing out some ill-drawn portrait of the family done by your three-year-old child.

It's what you feel when you see something weak and you want to protect and admire it rather than eat it or stamp on it.

Sentimental? Probably. Exasperating to others? Sometimes. Harmless? Mostly.

British?

Yes - but also pretty-much universal, I should think.


photo: Gaurav Pandit


Thing To Do Today: be soppy. The word soppy comes from the Old English sopp and is related to the Old Norse soppa, soup.