Mawkish

 WORD OF THE DAY

mawkish / adjective / MAW-kish

Definition
1: lacking flavor or having an unpleasant taste
2: exaggeratedly or childishly emotional

Examples
“It doesn’t (or shouldn’t) matter that ‘This Is Us’ is a network show in a sea of cable and streaming contenders or that [Mandy] Moore has a pop music and schmaltzy YA movie past. ... One of this season’s most poignant moments avoided a mawkish mood because of Moore’s ability to hold our teary gaze through song.”
— Emma Fraser, The Daily Beast, 23 May 2022

And the inevitable reaffirmation of the family’s bonds, strengthened by the spirit of the girls’ mother, is touching without being too mawkish.
— David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter, 18 Aug. 2022

Did You Know?
Mawkish really opens up a can of worms—or maggots, as it were: the word wriggled out from Middle English mawke, meaning “maggot.”
Its earliest sense, used in the late 17th century but now obsolete, was synonymous with squeamish (understandable!) but not long after that mawkish was used to describe an unpleasant, nauseating, often sickeningly sweet flavor.
It’s no surprise that a figurative sense of mawkish, used to describe things that are full of “sickly sweet” sentimentality, arose almost concurrently, one of several food texture- and taste-related words favored by critics to show disdain for art they deem overly emotive, including gooey, saccharine, mushy, and schmaltzy.