blandishment
noun
Irving Babbitt
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When Star Wars audiences first meet former smuggler Lando Calrissian—played iconically by Billy Dee Williams—in The Empire Strikes Back, he is full of blandishments, offering flattery (telling Leia “You truly belong here with us among the clouds”) and gifts to our heroes in the form of food and drink (“Will you join me for a little refreshment?”) in order to entice them into what we soon discover is a trap. Notably, before the whole sordid deal goes down (and before Lando’s eventual redemption), Han Solo calls him “an old smoothie.” Lando’s verbal smoothness can be linked to blandishment too: the word was formed from the verb blandish, meaning “to coax with flattery.” Blandish ultimately comes from the Latin adjective blandus, meaning “mild” or “flattering,” source too of our adjective bland, which typically describes things boring and flavorless but which can also mean “smooth and soothing in manner or quality”—a meaning that also applies to everyone’s favorite Cloud City administrator.
Examples of blandishment in a Sentence
Armond White, National Review, 17 May 2023
People want to hear blandishments about engagement and infrastructure.
—Rory Smith, New York Times, 14 Apr. 2023
Few can resist the Beltway’s beckoning, the blather of political pundits or the blandishment of campaign operatives urging them to run.
—Mark Z. Barabak, Los Angeles Times, 2 Apr. 2023
The fateful lane change arose out of one mayor’s resistance to such blandishments.
—Ephrat Livni, Quartz, 7 May 2020
At the same time, the softer architectural blandishments of postmodernism, promising the comforts of architectural history and tradition, were challenging modernists.
—Joseph Giovannini, New York Times, 4 Apr. 2020
Her 2014 autobiography, A Fighting Chance, and recent stump speeches are festooned in pep club spirit and folksy blandishments, cloying bits of business that have attached themselves to her life story.
—Caroline Fraser, The New York Review of Books, 13 Feb. 2020
The region’s main powers, Australia and New Zealand, fear the creation of a mendicant state on their doorsteps, susceptible, in particular, to Chinese bribes and blandishments.
—The Economist, 18 Dec. 2019
Having failed to win the Japanese around with blandishments, an increasingly desperate-looking Senard has reached for the stick.
—Washington Post, 18 Sep. 2019
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'blandishment.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Dictionary Entries Near blandishment
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“Blandishment.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/blandishment. Accessed 25 Apr. 2024.
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