Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A medicine whose effectiveness is unproved and whose ingredients are usually secret; a quack remedy.
- noun A favorite but usually ineffective remedy for problems or evils.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A medicine the ingredients of which, and the method of compounding them, are kept secret, for the purpose of restricting the profits of sale to the inventor or proprietor; especially, a quack medicine.
- noun Hence Any scheme or device of a quack or charlatan.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun A medicine, the ingredients of which are kept secret for the purpose of restricting the profits of sale to the inventor or proprietor; a quack medicine.
- noun Any scheme or device proposed by a quack.
- noun Any scheme asserted to solve a problem, but with no objective basis for belief in its effectiveness; esp., in politics, a scheme or proposal likely to prove popular with voters.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A
medicine orremedy inconventional use which has not beenproven to have anydesirable medical effects . - noun An
ineffective butfavorite remedy for a problem, usually involvingpolitical action.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun hypothetical remedy for all ills or diseases; once sought by the alchemists
- noun patent medicine whose efficacy is questionable
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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At the end of the day, discounting products is nothing more than a short-term nostrum for a problem that is much more severe and will benefit no one in the end if it isn't accompanied by making sure that there were patients to inject these products into.
pfblogs.org: The Ad-Free Personal Finance Blogs Aggregator 2008
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At the end of the day, discounting products is nothing more than a short-term nostrum for a problem that is much more severe and will benefit no one in the end if it isn't accompanied by making sure that there were patients to inject these products into.
Healthcare Sector and Stocks Analysis from Seeking Alpha 2008
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At the end of the day, discounting products is nothing more than a short-term nostrum for a problem that is much more severe and will benefit no one in the end if it isn't accompanied by making sure that there were patients to inject these products into.
Healthcare Sector and Stocks Analysis from Seeking Alpha 2008
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Jail is the conventional and time-honored nostrum, which is administered with a glow of moral self-esteem, and no more thought about it.
The Subterranean Brotherhood Julian Hawthorne 1890
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It was said to be a nostrum for "haemorrhage, dysentery, diarrohea, poisoning, plague, and nosebleeds."
Richard Bangs: Here Be Dragons: Mt. Pilatus in Switzerland, Part 3 Richard Bangs 2011
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It was said to be a nostrum for "haemorrhage, dysentery, diarrohea, poisoning, plague, and nosebleeds."
Richard Bangs: Here Be Dragons: Mt. Pilatus in Switzerland, Part 3 Richard Bangs 2011
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The nostrum, in fact truism, that countries cannot really devalue their way to prosperity is important to bear in mind.
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"Privatization" is a crowd-pleasing nostrum for public officials seeking to shed the budgetary cost of programs and services that they nevertheless know to be a public responsibility.
Essays/Opinions 2010
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None of this is surprising, though it does dismantle the liberal nostrum that a new entitlement will somehow reduce health spending.
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May I take this opportunity to wish all NLM readers a very happy and blessed Easter, in the words of the EF Martyrology: Hac die, quam fecit Dominus, Solemnitas solemnitatum, et Pascha nostrum: Resurrectio Salvatoris nostri Jesu Christi secundum carnem.
trivet commented on the word nostrum
snake oil
April 19, 2007
cosmican commented on the word nostrum
This experiment is an ineffective nostrum.
November 20, 2007
cosmican commented on the word nostrum
Meaning: A usually questionable remedy or scheme ; panacea
November 20, 2007
yarb commented on the word nostrum
Citation on crawler.
September 18, 2008