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Thanks grasscarp. Following your kind answer, I found this which may interest people like me who had never heard of the word ! "It�s an eponym, named after a fictional cartoon character named Caspar Milquetoast, invented by the American illustrator Harold Webster in 1924. The strip was called The Timid Soul and appeared every Sunday in the New York Herald Tribune up to his death in 1953. The name is a Frenchified respelling of the old American English term milk toast, an uninspiring, bland dish which was created from slices of buttered toast laid in a dish of milk, usually considered to be food for invalids. There�s an even older foodstuff, milksop, which was untoasted bread soaked in milk, likewise something suitable only for infants or the sick; milksop was a dismissive term for �an effeminate spiritless man or youth; one wanting in courage or manliness�, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it. Mr Milquetoast is in the same tradition.