soporific
Comments:- 8 months ago, bilby said:
Beddy bye-byes, bun-bun. - 8 months ago, seanahan said:
Wait, eating lettuce makes you sleepy? - 8 months ago, paulbullen said:
Soporific means causing sleepiness. Something is soporific if it causes sleepiness. If the effect of something is sleepiness, that thing is soporific. It is not the effect of that thing that is soporific, it is the thing itself, which is a cause.
Lettuce is soporific: the effect of eating lettuce is sleepiness. It is the cause of sleepiness--the lettuce--that is soporific, not the effect of that cause. It is possible that sleepiness is soporific (in that it tends to cause more sleepiness), but Beatrix Potter wanted to communicate the idea that lettuce itself causes sleepiness, not that sleepiness causes sleepiness.
She apparently had a desire to introduce the word "soporific", but she did so inaptly. Instead of saying, "It is said that the effect of eating too much lettuce is soporific," she should have said, "It is said lettuce is soporific, that eating too much lettuce makes you sleepy."
- about 1 year ago, frindley said:
Beatrix Potter's use of soporific is also invoked in Margaret Edson's excellent play W;t. (Also a film, the clever typography is meant to come out as Wit.) - about 1 year ago, frindley said:
I always bring out the Beatrix Potter quote as evidence that it is possible to nurture wordie-ness even in the very young. This is one of the very earliest books I remember reading. And even then I "got" what she was trying to do to my vocabulary, and I've been using the word ever since. - about 1 year ago, jeffazi said:
1. a. causing or tending to cause sleep. b. tending to dull awareness or alertness.
2. of, relating to, or marked by sleepiness or lethargy
- over 2 years ago, nkocharh said:
"It is said that the effect of eating too much lettuce is 'soporific.'
"I have never felt sleepy after eating lettuces; but then I am not a rabbit.
"They certainly had a very soporific effect upon the Flopsy Bunnies!"
-Beatrix Potter, The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies.