Excessively sweet or sentimental; artificially or sickeningly sweet in manner, tone, or content. Saccharine behavior or expression lacks genuine feeling and seems artificially sweetened.
From Latin 'saccharum' meaning 'sugar,' related to the artificial sweetener saccharin. Just as saccharin is artificially sweet but lacks the complexity of real sugar, saccharine emotions are artificially sweet but lack genuine depth.
Think of artificial sweetener - it's sweet, but there's something fake about it that leaves a weird aftertaste. Saccharine emotions are the same: sweet on the surface but artificially so, lacking the complex flavor of real feelings. Too much makes you feel sick.
Saccharine came to mean 'overly sweet' or 'insincere' partly through association with feminine sentimentality in 19th-century discourse; excess sweetness was coded as feminine artifice.
Use 'saccharine' for cloying quality without gendered undertones; simply mean 'excessively sweet or sentimental.'
["cloying","oversweet","maudlin"]
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