Meaning
Teasing with something desirable that stays just out of reach - offering the sight, smell, or promise of a pleasure while withholding satisfaction. The word carries its myth in miniature: closeness without contact, forever. Now usually mildly commercial - tantalizing menu descriptions, tantalizing trailers - though the underlying torment is one of the grimnier punishments in Homer. Regional use: General English; classical origin.
Origin
Tantalus stands in the underworld pool beneath a fruit tree, the water receding whenever he stoops to drink and the branches lifting beyond his fingers whenever he reaches to eat - the oldest surviving account is Odysseus's sight of him in the Odyssey's eleventh book, where Homer names no crime. Early poets more often hung a stone over his head: in the lost Nostoi, Zeus pins him under a boulder so fear spoils even the gods' banquet. His crimes multiplied in the tellings - serving his son Pelops to the gods, stealing nectar and ambrosia, repeating the gods' private conversation - and the Greeks already used Tantalean punishments proverbially for those with fine things they cannot enjoy. English formed the verb from his name: to torment with the sight of the desired and unreachable, with Thomas Fuller's 1640 line about the poor of Corinth who see and smell what the rich taste as an early witness, and the great novels sprinkled with it thereafter - Flatland in 1884, The Red Badge of Courage in 1895, Gatsby in 1925.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a tantalizing prospect
- tantalize
- tantalizingly close
Usage Examples
- The preview reel was tantalizing: two minutes of a film that would not open for five months.
- Recovery stayed tantalizingly close for the airline - one refinancing away, four times running.
- The auction house tantalized collectors with a single catalogue photograph of the unattributed panel.