pabulum

Word origin

Borrowed from Latin pābulum (“food, nourishment; fodder or pasture for animals; nourishment for the mind, food for thought”), from pā(scō) (“to nourish”) + -bulum (suffix denoting an instrument), or directly from Proto-Indo-European *peh₂-dʰlom (*peh₂- (“to protect, shepherd”) + *-dʰlom, variant of *-trom (suffix denoting a tool or instrument)).

Used in a sentence

• “And with the eye of a bird seeking for minute fragmnts of seed, minute insects, tiny parasites, we also look for things that to us are the constituents of our mental or visual pabula.”

• “But the rescheduling of the directors' meeting for 7.30 a.m., and the trotting-out of such tawdry pabulums?”

• “As this was largely a traditionally crafted speech, there were some painful cliches and political pabulum to which a typical politician might be prone, of course.”

Source: Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0