chocolate soldier
English
Etymology
Military sense popularized by George Bernard Shaw's 1894 play Arms and the Man.
Noun
chocolate soldier (plural chocolate soldiers)
- (Digger slang) Someone who is unwilling to fight.
- 1932 Warwick Deeping, Old wine and new, A. A. Knopf, p152
- To the maids across the way he was Julia's beau, and if not quite Beau Geste, a gent and well dressed. Obviously he was a chocolate soldier, a bouquet boy.
- 1965 Joseph Rosner, The haters' handbook, Delacorte Press, p195
- He described him as "a political corpse whose ghost has returned to haunt us," adding that he was "a chocolate soldier, ... a man who never faced an enemy nor successfully faced an issue."
- 2010 Robert Moss, Fire Along the Sky: Being the Adventures of Captain Shane Hardacre in the New World, SUNY Press, p51
- I thought he was a chocolate soldier which was probably unfair—everyone said he had done the “right thing” in the Canada campaign.
- 1932 Warwick Deeping, Old wine and new, A. A. Knopf, p152
- The butterfly Junonia iphita, the chocolate pansy.
Derived terms
- choc