You probably know what namby-pamby means. As an adjective: “Of literary or artistic style, a composition, etc.: weakly sentimental, insipidly pretty, affectedly or childishly ”; “Of a person or group of people: inclined to weak sentimentality, affectedly dainty; lacking vigour or drive; effeminate in expression or behaviour.” As a noun: “Weakly sentimental insipid style or writing; an example of this”; “A weak, fussy, or affected person.” But did you know where the word comes from? The Oxford English Dictionary, source of these definitions, explains:
Namby Pamby, a disparaging alteration (a reduplication with variation of initial consonant and suffixation … in imitation of childish speech) of the name of Ambrose Philips (1675-1749), author of sentimental poems (especially concerning children).I have Ambrose Philips on my mind this week, having used his namby-pamby translation of a Sappho fragment alongside other (better) translations as a way into thinking about reading ancient poets. (’m teaching Backgrounds of Western Literature, or Backwards in Western Lit.) Here is Philips (1711):
Philips’s poems were ridiculed in print by Henry Carey, John Gay, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift; the nickname Namby Pamby was used by Carey as the title of his parody of Philips’s verse, and subsequently by Pope in the Dunciad.
In sharp contrast, Mary Barnard (1958):
From galloping couplets to William Carlos Williams-like enjambment (“he // who,” “of / your”), from a glowing bosom and “dewy Damps” to flame and dripping sweat. Note too that Philips’s translation is far from clear on the direction of the speaker’s desire, which is not for the youth/godlike man but for the woman speaking to that man. That Sappho was a woman who wrote of love between women always surprises some students, who assume that the poem presents a heterosexual love triangle. (Not that there’d be anything wrong with that!) Such a triangle is the scenario in Catullus’s Latin adaptation of this poem, which “straightens” Sappho’s lyric into an expression of male heterosexual desire.
There’s nothing namby-pamby about Sappho, or Catullus, or Mary Barnard.