Look up Milquetoast in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Casper Milquetoast was a comic stripcharacter created by Harold Webster in 1924 for his comic strip The Timid Soul, published in the New York World. From this character the term "milquetoast" has come to mean "weak and ineffectual." Webster continued to produce the comic strip until his death in 1952, after which his assistant Herb Roth carried it on for another year. The name is a deliberate misspelling of the name of a bland and fairly inoffensive food, milk toast. Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... Wiktionary (a portmanteau of wiki and dictionary) is a multilingual, Web-based project to create a free content dictionary, available in over 150 languages. ... This article is about the comic strip, the sequential art form as published in newspapers and on the Internet. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Year 1924 (MCMXXIV) was a leap year starting on Tuesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... The New York World was a newspaper published in New York from 1860 until 1931. ... 1952 (MCMLII) was a Leap year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ... Milk toast is a breakfast food consisting mainly, though not entirely, of toasted bread dipped in or covered in hot milk into which a small amount of butter is melted. ...
Meanings
The term can refer to someone who lets others win at his/her expense. People who behave in this way may become so completely submissive that others describe them as a "doormat".
The term can be used to describe a person of an unusually meek or submissive nature, or someone who is overly sensitive, timid, indecisive or cowardly. More rarely, it denotes someone who is chronically ill. Milk toast is light and easy to digest, therefore appropriate food for an invalid, or anyone with a "nervous stomach".
Further reading
H. T. Webster, Introduction by Ring Lardner, The Timid Soul, Simon and Schuster (1931)
The Best of H. T. Webster: A Memorial Collection, Simon and Schuster (1953), hardcover, 254 pages.
CasparMilquetoast was a comic strip character created by the cartoonist Harold Tucker Webster (1885-1952) for the New York Herald Tribune and other newspapers in the late 1920s.
From this character the term "milquetoast" has come to mean "weak and ineffectual." Webster continued to produce the comic strip until his death in 1952, after which his assistant Herb Roth carried it on for another year.
Milquetoast is the name of a cockroach in the comic strips Bloom County and Outland by Berkely Breathed.
Spelled with a lowercase 'm', milquetoast is an American English variant of milktoast and is similarly used to refer to a weak and timid person, particularly an emasculated man.
Milquetoast was described by his creator as `a man who speaks softly and gets hit with a big stick." His hat blows off onto a lawn, but seeing the "Keep Off the Grass" sign, he sighs and goes off to buy a new hat.
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