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chocolate soldier

noun

Etymology

Military sense popularized by George Bernard Shaw's 1894 play Arms and the Man.

Definitions

  1. Someone who is unwilling to fight.

    • To the maids across the way he was Julia's beau, and if not quite Beau Geste, a gent and well dressed. Obviously he was a chocolate soldier, a bouquet boy.
    • He described him as "a political corpse whose ghost has returned to haunt us," adding that he was "a chocolate soldier, ... a man who never faced an enemy nor successfully faced an issue."
    • I thought he was a chocolate soldier which was probably unfair—everyone said he had done the “right thing” in the Canada campaign.

  2. The butterfly Junonia iphita, the chocolate pansy.

The neighborhood

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sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA