sottisier

English

Etymology

Borrowed from French sottisier.

Noun

sottisier (plural sottisiers)

(literature, uncommon) A compilation of banal, hackneyed, or otherwise objectionable snippets of text from various authors.
- 1934, Ezra Pound, “Date Line”, in Make It New, London: Faber & Faber, page 16:
  I had intended to provide the book derisively with an appendix, vermiform. Papa Flaubert compiled a sottisier, I also compiled a sottisier. I do not yield a jot in my belief that such compilations are useful, I concede that there may be no need of reprinting mine at this moment. At any rate the snippets are there on file.
- 1961, Harry Levin, Irving Babbitt and the Teaching of Literature, Harvard University Press, page 10:
  Frequently he brought his points home with topical allusions: timely newspaper clippings or public utterances, constituting a sort of sottisier or scrapbook of contemporary fatuities.
- 1985 December 23, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “Book of The Times”, in The New York Times‎:
  Suppose a serious literary critic were to write about Hollywood autobiographies: “Niven experiences life as an imprisoning reality of personal experience, plus mythopoeic elements, a vast sottisier in the tradition of Jessel's This way, Miss. […]
- 1986, Conor Cruise O’Brien, “The Cant of Pity”, in The Atlantic‎, →ISSN:
  The sottisier, which is a rich one, is drawn almost entirely from books and articles by French left-wing intellectuals about the Third World, mostly written during the sixties and seventies, but with some examples from the present decade.
- 2007, Clive James, Cultural Amnesia, page 631:
  In the Israeli press, a constant feature is a sottisier of what the official Arab publications, including school textbooks, say about the eternal iniquity of the Jewish race and the holy necessity to eradicate it from the face of the Earth.