Word of the Day: sardoodledum

What's "the word I'm thinking of" this New Year's Eve? It's....

sardoodledum (noun)

Dramatic works with exaggerated, contrived, trivial, or deplorable plots; soap opera; melodrama.

"As for Sudermann, he chose to temper the rigors of the Schalf-Holz formula (by Ibsen out of Zola) with sardoodledum. The result was this "Heimat," in which naturalism was wedded to a mellow sentimentality, caressing to audiences bred upon the drama of perfumed adultery."
—H. L. Mencken, "Hermann Sudermann," Prejudices: First Series (1919)

Sometimes life imitates daytime drama. The New Year's party we attended was given by a woman who divorced, then decided to have a child with a married man who now lives in another country, but whom she manages to visit there periodically, along with their two-year-old. Meanwhile, as she was planning this party (with a very animated two-year-old "monkey" underfoot), her mother lay dying in a nursing home, and she was expecting a number of relatives from elsewhere around the nation to arrive within a day or so (to say their farewells to Mother); they would all be staying in her tiny apartment. Also meanwhile, she's been constructing a labyrinthine website showcase for her creative endeavors.

I was mightily impressed. Under similar circumstances, I can't imagine summoning the enterprise to mount a New Year's party (or even to get out of bed), but some people manage to survive and even thrive while living in a melodrama, a soap opera, a true-life...sardoodledum.

By the way, when you search for "sardoodledum" in Google Images (click the link above), for some reason, many depictions of the Beatles, and specifically the "cute one", result. Ob-la-di, ob-la-da.