"There's no sugarcoating it," President Barack Obama admitted in his statement on Monday about the glitchy rollout of HealthCare.gov. "The website has been too slow."
It was a rhetorical move, an attempt by the White House to show that it was owning up to the system's malfunctioning in a forthright manner, rather than equivocating about it. But how did "sugarcoating" become the standard metaphor for trying to make a situation seem more attractive than it actually is?
The answer lies in pharmacology. As long as doses of medicine have been dispensed in pill form, apothecaries and pharmacists have tried to find ways to make the pills go down more easily. Historically, the final step in pill-making has involved giving the pills a finish of some sort to make them more palatable. For several centuries, gold or silver leaf was a common kind of finish for pills that were overly bitter.
These early medicinal practices left an imprint on the language. Beginning in the 16th century, "swallowing a bitter pill" developed a figurative meaning of accepting an unpleasant fact. A century later, as the gold-leaf finish became a popular covering, the metaphor was extended to "gilding the pill," an idiom describing efforts to soften harsh realities.
By the 19th century, gilding was replaced by sweeter approaches to pill-finishing. In 1837, a French inventor patented a process for coating pills in sugar, using methods similar to how a confectioner would create sugarcoated bonbons. The results were called dragées in French and "sugar-plums" or "sweetmeats" in English.
The sugarcoating of pills was imported to the U.S. in the 1840s, and as they went into large-scale production, the language followed suit again. In an 1846 article in the Ladies' Repository, a Cincinnati-based Methodist magazine, readers are said to "swallow" a romantic story when it is properly disguised, "as they would a 'sugarcoated pill,' or any nauseous medicine done up in sweetmeats."
"Sugarcoating" soon entered American political discourse, as an apt figure of speech to indicate how legislation on a contentious issue like slavery could be made more acceptable. Speaking in favor of the Compromise of 1850, which temporarily eased territorial tensions between North and South, Nathan S.S. Beman, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, said, "To be sure, it contains some bitter pills, and they are not sugarcoated either!"
"Sugarcoating" came to be associated with euphemism and less-than-sincere linguistic sweeteners. Though we long ago ceased to coat actual pills in sugar, political leaders are still at pains to show that their doses of truth are not similarly sweetened.