- 1萬靈丹（這裡多半指「聽起來能立刻解決問題、其實幫不上忙的主張」，不一定是藥）
A nostrum is an idea someone puts forward as an easy answer to a hard problem, when it probably will not help much at all. Writers in newspapers like the word: a political nostrum, the old nostrums about 'just try harder'. It is a cool, slightly sharp word — you use it when you do not trust the cure. Though actually it began as a medicine word. Latin nostrum means 'ours'. People selling homemade remedies labelled them as 'our own special mix', and the name stuck first to doubtful , then to doubtful ideas. You can still meet the older medicine sense in careful writing, but the sense you will meet most now is the easy fix that is not a fix. It is not playground English; it belongs to news, essays, and argument.
組成A learned borrowing from Latin nostrum, 'ours', the neuter form of noster, 'our'. A label that once meant 'our own (remedy)'.
原始詞典資料2 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
nostrumnoun/ˈnɒs.tɹəm/
- 1
A medicine or remedy in conventional use which has not been proven to have any desirable medical effects.
- Near-synonyms: paternoster, patent medicine, snake oil
- Nay, he would sometimes retire hither to take his beer, and it was not without difficulty that he was prevented from forcing Jones to take his beer too: for no quack ever held his nostrum to be a more general panacea than he did this; which, he said, had more virtue in it than was in all the physic in an apothecary's shop.
- 2
An ineffective but favorite remedy for a problem, usually involving political action.
- reformers of church charities [...made] known […] their different nostrums for setting Hiram's Hospital on its feet again.
- And not because some clatch of bureaucrats in Strasbourg or Luxembourg have issued yet another directive, but because Europeans are recognising that 19th century nostrums are not solutions to 21st century problems—on the contrary, they are the problem—and it's time to encourage competition, risk taking, democracy and meritocracy, and, dare I say it, dreaming about a different, better future.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。