What Does Blandishment Mean? The Word for Every Nice Thing Somebody Says Right Before They Ask You for Something
Amanda calls the guest brilliant. Pete agrees and raises it to genius. Steve Washington, flat and without missing a beat: "Stop with the blandishment." So what does blandishment mean? A flattering remark or gesture used to coax somebody into doing what you want. Praise with an agenda riding on it. It's the word of the week in Episode 110 of Sorta Sophisticated, and it takes about four minutes for all three people in the room to start using it on each other.
What Does Blandishment Mean, Exactly?
A blandishment is a flattering or coaxing remark, action or gesture used to persuade someone: praise deployed to get a result, and usually used in the plural.
Amanda gets there in two guesses. "Like a smooth operator," she says, then lands it: "Ulterior motive." That's the whole word. Pete's version on-mic is the same one the dictionary gives, that it's "a nice thing you say or do to convince someone to do something."
The Dragon That Blandishes With the Head and Smites With the Tail
Pete reads the etymology out and gets it right. Blandishment traces back through Anglo-French blandir to the Latin blandīrī, "to flatter, soothe, caress," from blandus — smooth-talking, alluring, the kind of person you agree with and regret it later. Some etymologists run blandus all the way back to a Proto-Indo-European root for "soft."
The verb landed in English first. Blandish shows up around the middle of the 14th century, and one of its earliest recorded appearances is in the writing of Richard Rolle, the English hermit and mystic, warning about the dragon that blandishes with the head and smites with the tail. Six hundred years later nobody has improved on that as a definition. The noun took another two centuries to form. Blandishment, "flattering speech," is first recorded in the 1590s.
Then it nearly disappeared. The OED notes the word went rare through the 17th and 18th centuries, and Samuel Johnson said he knew it mostly from Milton. Milton uses it in Paradise Lost, Book VIII, in the scene where the animals file past Adam to be named: "These cowring low / With blandishment, each Bird stoop'd on his wing."
The first famous blandishment in English literature is birds sucking up.
It Doesn't Have to Be a Lie
The distinction worth keeping is the one that earns this word its space next to flattery.
Flattery is praise that's false. A blandishment is praise that's aimed. The compliment can be completely sincere and still be a blandishment, because what makes it one is the thing it's steering you toward. Pete calling Steve a genius is true. Steve calls it anyway.
Amanda tries the word on Pete a few minutes earlier and doesn't quite get away with it. She tells him she's "way interested in what Steve has to say," which is a compliment to the guest and a stopwatch on the host. Pete translates it for her: hurry up and get through my part. Amanda shrugs and claims the assignment anyway. "I guess that's my blandishment in the moment."
Pete's ruling: "That wasn't good. That was a backhanded."
Amanda's appeal: "Still. Still ulterior motive."
She's right on the technicality. What makes a blandishment is the motive, not the warmth. Which is why Pete's confession a minute earlier is the honest one. "I literally live my life blandishing everybody every day," he says, unprompted, before anyone has accused him of anything.
The Constitution Was Ratified on Blandishments
Episode 110 is a 250th-birthday episode, and the argument running under it is whether the Constitution was meant to be a finished document or a rough draft. What gets skipped in that argument is how the thing passed at all, which is a story about persuasion rather than principle.
In February 1788 the Massachusetts ratifying convention was going to vote it down. So the Federalists made a deal. Ratify now, and we'll formally recommend a list of amendments to the first Congress. John Hancock and Samuel Adams came across. The convention ratified on February 6, 1788, by 187 to 168 — a margin of nineteen votes.
Four of the five states that ratified after Massachusetts copied the move, sending their own recommended amendments along with their yes. Madison, who had argued a bill of rights was unnecessary, sat down and wrote one. The first ten amendments to the United States Constitution exist because a promise was needed to close a sale.
Hamilton Wrote 51 Essays Selling a Document He Didn't Like
Pete's closing fun fact is the biggest blandishment in American history — and he doesn't call it that.
Alexander Hamilton thought the Constitution was far too weak. At the Convention on June 18, 1787, he'd proposed an executive who served during good behavior, which is a president for life in everything but name. On the day of signing, by Madison's notes, Hamilton allowed that no man's ideas were more remote from the plan than his own were known to be. He signed it anyway, the only delegate from New York to do so.
Then he wrote 51 of the 85 Federalist essays arguing the country would fall apart without it.
Call it the word operating at national scale. Hamilton kept flattering a document he'd been outvoted on until a country believed in it, which is either the most cynical thing in the founding or the most patriotic, and Pete can't decide either.
The Tell Is What Comes Next
The useful thing about knowing this word is that it gives you something to listen for. Not the compliment. The beat after it.
"You're the only one who really understands this stuff" is a nice sentence. "You're the only one who really understands this stuff, so I was wondering if you could take a look at something" is a blandishment, and you're already holding it.
None of which makes it a bad thing to be on the receiving end of. Steve caught Pete in real time and the conversation got better, not worse, because everybody in the room could name what was happening. That's the difference between being handled and being handled by somebody who lets you see the hand.
Episode 110 of Sorta Sophisticated has Pete arguing that America turned a working machine into a museum piece, and a descendant of George Washington's brother refusing to agree with him. Also in there: the handwritten family tree Steve holds up to the camera and the reference book that backs it up, and Thomas Jefferson's proposal that the whole Constitution should expire every 19 years.
Hear the full episode here 👇 Happy Birthday America: Now Go Do Your Homework (Episode 110)
