Meaning
A concession or bribe given to quiet someone troublesome - a small offering whose only purpose is to get a difficulty, critic, or watchdog out of the way. The tone is usually cynical: the giver expects nothing from the sop but passage. Literary and wry; it flatters the writer's classical reading and quietly insults the recipient, so deploy it where condescension is the point. Often shortened to a bare sop. Regional use: General English; classical Latin origin.
Origin
In Book VI of Virgil's Aeneid, the Sibyl guides Aeneas into the underworld by throwing the three-headed hound Cerberus a loaf laced with honey and herbs, which puts him to sleep - a passage ancient readers met with the Greek practice of placing honey cakes in graves for the dead. The figurative phrase is the older English allusion: an Atlantic essayist wrote in 1914 that a controversialist 'has thrown a sop to Cerberus' and won acceptance in circles that had shut him out, and another in 1921 described pacifying hostile train passengers with English cigarettes as a sop to Cerberus with the happiest results. A 2017 Guardian columnist used it of a prime minister offering a sop to the Cerberus of the Tory Brexiters, keeping the hound alive and well-fed. Wiktionary's definition is blunt: something given or done to pacify or bribe.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a sop for Cerberus
- give a sop to Cerberus
- throw a sop to Cerberus
Usage Examples
- The one free hour of parking was a sop to Cerberus, buying the council a year of quiet over the permits.
- Naming an intern to the working group looked less like reform than a sop to Cerberus.
- The bonus offer was a sop to Cerberus, and the regulators, recognizing it as such, declined it.