Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a relatively obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar, another brick to add to the wall of your vocabulary. This week's word:
BROMIDE
A bromide is a chemical compound involving the element bromine. Sodium bromide was the basis of Bromo-Seltzer, a remedy for indigestion and heartburn offered to the public by Isaac E. Emerson of Baltimore. Mr. Emerson, inspired by the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, caused to be erected at the corner of Eutaw and Lombard streets a fifteen-story imitation, which for many years boasted a fifty-one-foot blue illuminated rotating Bromo-Seltzer bottle at its apex. Ah, America.
The sense of the word expands beyond the merely technical and chemical because a particular compound, potassium bromide (KBr) has been used as a sedative. Thus, by metaphoric extension a bromide (pronounced BRO-mide) came to be a trite saying or platitude, something dull and obvious that might put you to sleep.
In his campaign for the presidency in the 1964 New Hampshire primary, Safire's Political Dictionary informs us, Nelson Rockefeller was given so frequently to invoke "the brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God" that Mr. Rockefeller's stenotypist took to abbreviating the phrase as BOMFOG. Bomfog, in due course, was taken up by the press corps for its echo of bombast and fog, becoming in time a word identifying this species of bromide.
Example: From Lance Morrow's "God Knows What the Court Was Thinking" in Time, July 1, 2002, on the addition of "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance: " Even as a callow youth, I sensed that someone had intruded an alien and politicized bromide into the pledge."