sappy
Part of speech: adj
Morphological type: derivation
Etymology: From Middle English sappy, sapy, from Old English sæpiġ (“full of sap, succulent”), equivalent to sap + -y. Cognate with West Frisian sappig (“juicy”), Dutch sappig (“juicy, succulent”), Middle High German saffic, seffec ("juicy, succulent"; > German saftig), Danish saftig (“juicy”), Swedish saftig (“juicy”). Doublet of zaftig.
Base: sap
Affixes: -y
Inflected forms:
form: sappier
pos: adj
tags: comparative
form: sappiest
pos: adj
tags: superlative
Senses:
gloss: Excessively sweet, emotional, nostalgic; cheesy; mushy. (British equivalent: soppy)
pos: adj
tags: US
examples: He was a good deal of a character, and much better company than the sappy literature he was selling.
To himself, already beginning to resent the new employer as all that morning he had been resenting the old one, Dr. Planish groaned, “He’s getting saintly on me! A careerist in holiness! I'll never be happy till I've got an organization where I’m sole boss—unless it’s one run by a fellow like Colonel Marduc, who has real brains and power—and cash!—and not a lot of sappy sentimentality like Vesper or psychopathic malice like Sneaky Sandy—Oh dear!”
It was a sappy love song, but it reminded them of their first dance.
gloss: Having (a particularly large amount of) sap.
pos: adj
examples: ‘Torches are made to light, jewels to wear,
Dainties to taste, fresh beauty for the use,
Herbs for their smell, and sappy plants to bear:
Things growing to themselves are growth’s abuse:
Seeds spring from seeds and beauty breedeth beauty;
Thou wast begot; to get it is thy duty.
But these, tho’ fed with careful dirt,
Are neither green nor sappy;
Half-conscious of the garden-squirt,
The spindlings look unhappy,
The sappy green twig-tips of the season’s growth would not, she thought, be appreciably woodier on the day she became a wife, so near was the time; the tints of the foliage would hardly have changed.
As always, there was a fizzing, popping blaze of pine and sappy apple logs in the fireplace.
The corridor stinks of sweat and cigarette smoke, and I daringly open the window a little. The freshest air floats in, smelling of sappy grasses, the delicate pollens of wild flowers, the resins of the pine forests; hinting at the chill blue scent of distant snows.
gloss: Juicy.
pos: adj
tags: obsolete
examples: 1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book Two, Canto XII, Stanza 56, edited by Erik Gray, Hackett, 2006, p. 214,
In her left hand a Cup of gold she held,
And with her right the riper fruit did reach,
Whose sappy liquor, that with fulnesse sweld,
Into her cup she scruzd, with daintie breach
Of her fine fingers, without fowle empeach,
That so faire winepresse made the wine more sweet:
1693, François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book III, (1546), translated by Thomas Urquhart, Chapter 18,
The words of the third article are: She will suck me at my best end. Why not? That pleaseth me right well. You know the thing; I need not tell you that it is my intercrural pudding with one end. I swear and promise that, in what I can, I will preserve it sappy, full of juice, and as well victualled for her use as may be.
Did first the Rigour of their Kind expell,
And suppled into softness as they fell;
Then swell’d, and swelling, by degrees grew warm;
And took the Rudiments of human Form.
Imperfect Shapes: in Marble such are seen,
When the rude Chizzel does the Man begin;
While yet the roughness of the Stone remains,
Without the rising Muscles, and the Veins.
The sappy parts, and next resembling juice,
Were turn’d to moisture, for the Body’s use:
Supplying humours, blood and nourishment;
gloss: Spongy; Having spaces in which large quantities of sap can flow.
pos: adj
tags: obsolete
examples: In flush-framing if is observable, that the failure of all timber in old buildings has commenced much sooner than they otherwise would have done, owing to the sappy wood being at the corners of the principal beams, which soon decays, as its spongy quality attracts the moisture; whereas the heart, espescially of oak, will be as sound as the first day it was used.
...wood is of a soft spungy nature ; sappy, and alluring to the worm.
I can state some of them here on a. book ; I have the particulars at home, but I can give you some of them here ; this is the Twelfth street pier, number fifty-four [reading from memorandum], 12x12 pine sticks, wormy and sappy ; one sappy ; one piece 12x12 completely rotten
The reason of which difference may probably be, that the charring of Vegetables, being an operation quickly perform'd, and whilest the Wood is sappy, the more solid parts may more easily shrink together, and contract the pores or interstitia between them, then in the rotten Wood, where that natural juice seems onely to be wash'd away by adventitious or unnatural moisturel and so though the natural juice be wasted from between the firm parts, yet those parts are kept asunder by the adventitious moystures, and so by degrees settled in those postures.
Derived words: sappily
sappiness
unsappy
Translations: