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The noun blandification designates the action or process of becoming or being made plain, ordinary, uninteresting or insipid.
This noun is from:
– the adjective bland, meaning: plain, ordinary, uninteresting or insipid;
– the suffix ‑ification, forming nouns of action.
The noun blandification occurs, for example, in the following from Filleting with forked tongue and sharp wit, by Justine McCarthy, published in the Irish Independent (Dublin, County Dublin, Ireland) of Saturday 20th July 2002 [Weekend supplement: page 6, column 2]:
The word “euphemism” is itself a euphemism for an absence of candour […]. George Orwell 1 believed it had the power to make murder sound respectable. But it is not to be confused with political correctness, an obfuscating didacticism imposed by the Politburo of language which dictates that everyone is either challenged or an -ist. Don’t tell me that blind people prefer to be classified as “photonically non-receptive” or the elderly as “gerontologically advanced”. As for the absurdity of branding the neighbourhood drunk “spatially perplexed”, you might as will [sic] shove him under the Niagara Falls and fill him with Colombia’s entire coffee production. PC—or “selective speech”, as PC-ers call it—is a blandification of language, the opposite to euphemism.
1 George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair – 1903-50) was a British novelist and essayist.
These are, in chronological order, the earliest occurrences of the noun blandification that I have found:
1-: From The Modern Retreat from Function, by Peter van Dresser, published in The Subversive Science: Essays Toward an Ecology of Man (Boston (Massachusetts): Houghton Mifflin Company, 1969), edited by Paul Shepard and Daniel McKinley [page 364, column 1]:
The preparation of food […] has retreated to an esoteric domain of immaculate and hermetically sealed machinery, the culmination of which is the inevitable cellophane package or tinned container. All the old lusty smells and sensations attendant upon the grinding of corn, roasting of coffee, the fermenting of yeast in bread or beer, the pressing of apples or grapes, have been banished in favor of a hushed operating room asepsis. Gourmets have long lamented the resulting blandification of foodstuffs—the average American child now cannot tolerate foods of marked flavor and character; he subsists on an emolient [sic] of homogenized peanut-butter, triply ground hamburger and emulsified chocolate milk.
2-: From Americans Are Solid, the transcript of a speech delivered on Friday 17th August 1973 by Richard M. Scammon, Director of the Elections Research Center, Government Affairs Institute, Washington, D.C., published in the Winter 1973-74 issue of Perspectives in Defense Management (Washington, D.C.: Industrial College of the Armed Forces) [page 7, column 2]:
As I look back over the last, say, dozen years in Washington, I can recall very few great political issues that have swayed millions of voters. In fact, I can think of only three. One was Roman Catholicism, which moved a lot of people towards Kennedy and a lot of people towards Nixon in the 1960 campaign. The other two issues were Goldwater in ’64 and McGovern in ’72.
Otherwise, most of the so-called issues were not issues at all. They were appeals to traditionalism, appeals to imagery, appeals through personality. “Let’s get America moving”—what does [it] mean? It doesn’t mean a damn thing, except please vote for me, because I’m a better man than my opponent; I’ll make America move, and he won’t. Nobody wants America not to move. Or this other perennial political posture which you see in every election—the picture of the candidate with his jacket thrown causally across his shoulder, tie loosened, looking out over a body of water (presumably unpolluted), and patting a dog on the head, while the caption reads: SCAMMON CARES. No one says what I care about—presumably it’s about you, the voter—but this effort at blandification, if I may coin the word, is an essential feature of what I would call the nonconfrontation aspect of politics.
3-: From the column Politics In Review, by Martin Smith, political editor, published in The Sacramento Bee (Sacramento, California, USA) of Thursday 2nd November 1978 [page B8, column 5]:
Richard Scammon, one of the more gifted public opinion analysts, has warned candidates that in today’s climate of opinion, “the more direct, positive and forthright stands you take, the more likely you are to be beaten. To win, you had better be ambivalent.”
Scammon says this partly is because so many voters themselves have mixed feelings about the major issues. “The masses are going to choose someone who represents the masses’ ambivalence,” said Scammon to a group of political writers just before this year’s campaigning got under way. “The congressman takes on the blandification of his own district.”
4-: From Why you won’t be seeing all that’s offered, by Sophia Jensen, published in The Press Democrat (Santa Rosa, California, USA) of Friday 26th September 1980 [page 1B, column 6]:
The corporations who control distribution just aren’t interested in taking risks on films of great artistic merit but less-than-blockbuster audience appeal. […]
[…]
Here, there are growing fears that the surge of sales to networks and cable systems (which tend to ensure that movies won’t lose money) will lead to increasing blandification of the product.
5-: From the title of an article by the U.S. political commentator William F. Buckley Jr. (1925-2008), published in several newspapers on Thursday 1st March 1984—for example in The Morning Call (Allentown, Pennsylvania, USA) [page A10, column 2]:
The blandification of Ronald Reagan 2
David Gergen 3 was the director of communications at the White House for several years before pulling out a few months ago to return to private life. You will not be surprised to learn that he thinks Mr. Reagan needs to bring “new ideas and energy into a second term.” […]
[…]
What Gergen has in mind for President Reagan’s second term is that he should ignore conservative thought domestically, and abroad, revise weakward our policy of resistance to Soviet encroachment. Not bad, this agenda for one man. It calls merely for undoing the Federalist Papers, and unliving Lenin. And progressing into history with the force and personality of a vanilla milkshake.
2 The Republican statesman Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) was the 40th President of the USA from 1981 to 1989.
3 David Gergen (born 1942) is a former presidential adviser.
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