emollience

emollience

English

Noun

emollience (usually uncountable, plural emolliences)

1. The state or quality of being emollient; soothingness; softness.
   • 2010, Stephanie Rose Bird, The Big Book of Soul: The Ultimate Guide to the African American Spirit, Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc. (2010), →ISBN, unnumbered page:

     The emollience of peach flesh, peach kernel oil, and creamy coconut milk, balanced with soothing chamomile and oat straw, makes this the perfect skin concotion.

   • 2011, Alistair Campbell, Power & The People 1997-1999: The Alistair Campbell Diaries Volume 2, Hutchinson (2011), →ISBN, page 528:

     TB [Tony Blair] felt we had to combine emollience of tone with the clear drive and direction of continuing reform.

   • 2011, Jonathan Haslam, Russia's Cold War: From the October Revolution to the Fall of the Wall, Yale University Press (2011), →ISBN, page 34:

     His behavior was not implausibly assumed to reflect, albeit indirectly, larger elements at work, even if mitigated by the cosmopolitan, patrician emollience of his character, as against the awkward, provincial angularity of his untried successor, then Vice President, Harry Truman.

2. The act of soothing or appeasing; mollification.
   • 2009, Justin Cartwright, To Heaven by Water, Bloomsbury (2010), →ISBN, pages 127-128:

     When it became clear to Josh that she thought he was a 'dipstick', she tried emollience: 'No, not at all. I just thought maybe you were going on too long. They were all too drunk or stupid to keep up.'

   • 2010, Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir, Signal (2011), →ISBN, page 202:

     The closing years of "Old Labour" in Britain were years laced with corruption, cynicism, emollience, and drift.

   • 2012, Blair Worden, God's Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell, Oxford University Press (2012), →ISBN, page 180:

     The party of William Sprigge and Robert Wood, the educational reformers, was not a force for emollience.