milk-and-water and wishy-washy

EDITORIAL: Improving education

2008/7/3

Following the 2006 revision to the Fundamental Law of Education, the government has set its first basic plan for the promotion of education. While the plan covers a variety of policies, its apparent attempt to please everybody makes it seem wishy-washy.

You never hear an avowed right-winger or left-winger say of a favorite judge or politician, "I like him because he's a real ideologue." Such an admiring assessment would be seen as coming from the troglodyte right or the loony left. Instead, the more acceptable synonym is an adjective, principled. This contrasts with the nouns pragmatist, centrist, moderate, which some extremely principled partisans think of as wishy-washy, opportunist or muddle-headed.

That the cult of action was first and foremost an old literary myth was understood--or is being understood--very slowly.
I would like to say that this attitude was not entirely mistaken. It meant the rejection of a wishy washy, so-called social literature, the rejection of a wrongheaded notion of the committed writer. And so in some ways it brought us closer to a proper evaluation of the social function of literature, far closer than any fatheaded traditional literary cult could have been.

wishy-washy Show phonetics
adjective INFORMAL DISAPPROVING
lacking in colour, firm ideas, principles or noticeable qualities of any type:
Politically they're neither right-wing nor left - just a bunch of wishy-washy pseudo-liberals.
Watercolours are a bit wishy-washy for my taste.

wishy-washy

(wĭsh'ē-wŏsh'ē, -wô'shē) adj. Informal., -i·er, -i·est.

1. Thin and watery, as tea or soup; insipid.
2. Lacking in strength of character or purpose; ineffective.

[Reduplication of washy, thin, watery, from WASH.]

丁丁有妙文:交融謂之淡

milk-and-water

adj.

Insipid; weak; wishy-washy.

日本的Yahoo 詞典:

[形]気の抜けた, 生気のない, つまらない, めそめそした, センチメンタルな.

example
The movie I watched last night was like milk and water.
昨晩観た映画、つまんなかったわ。

台灣的Yahoo 詞典

land of milk and honey
a country where living conditions are good and people have the opportunity to make a lot of money:
Many Mexicans regard the United States as a land of milk and honey.

milk and honey

1.

多種多樣的享受

2.

豐饒