How to Use nostrum in a Sentence

nostrum

noun
  • The old nostrum that France is ungovernable may be tested again.
    — New York Times, 23 Apr. 2022
  • This is a departure from the standard time-travel nostrum that any change to the past runs the danger of making things immeasurably worse in the future.
    — Jennifer Ouellette and Sean M. Carroll, Ars Technica, 24 Nov. 2023
  • America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy, not revolution but restoration.
    — Daniel Henninger, WSJ, 19 June 2019
  • Marketers of economic nostrums such as cryptocurrency and gold investments don’t win customers by proclaiming that happy days are here again.
    — Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 6 July 2023
  • Studies reporting behavioral improvement from treatment with turmeric and green tea vex skeptics of dietary nostrums.
    — Washington Post, 5 Dec. 2019
  • Perhaps there is a more natural nostrum – partial and insufficient, but helpful nonetheless – closer to hand.
    — Pavel Goldstein, Discover Magazine, 17 Jan. 2018
  • Population trends today should raise serious questions about all the old nostrums that humans are somehow hard-wired to replace themselves to continue the species.
    — Nicholas Eberstadt, Foreign Affairs, 10 Oct. 2024
  • Good-guy Stevie’s ambiguous love lyric is superficially in sync with Biden’s tentative nostrum.
    — Armond White, National Review, 25 Nov. 2020
  • Expressed in what economists call the Phillips curve, this nostrum proved nearly useless in explaining the economy’s recent behavior.
    — David J. Lynch, Washington Post, 28 Jan. 2024
  • But writers such as Holiday attempt to transform Stoicism into an antibiotic or nostrum.
    — Tom Bissell, Harper’s Magazine , 10 Apr. 2023
  • Eight years later, Democrats have devolved into nostrums about appealing to the middle class, ditching academic language, and finding a uniting message.
    — Alexander Nazaryan, Washington Examiner - Political News and Conservative Analysis About Congress, the President, and the Federal Government, 21 Mar. 2025
  • This episode of What’s Ahead lays out why Schumer’s nostrum is the economic equivalent of doctors who centuries ago thought bleeding patients was a great cure for all sorts of ailments.
    — Steve Forbes, Forbes, 3 May 2022
  • The alternative-energy nostrum is make-believe, as are the other administration excuses for the sharp increase in gasoline prices.
    — Benjamin Zycher, National Review, 17 Mar. 2022
  • Another consequence is that the focus on arming teachers and other nostrums directed at school campus safety shifts attention from gun-safety policies much more likely to work.
    — Michael Hiltzik, latimes.com, 16 Mar. 2018
  • Never in modern times has an occupant of the Oval Office seemed to reject so thoroughly the nostrum that a president’s duty is to bring the country together.
    — Peter Baker, New York Times, 24 Sep. 2017
  • Never in modern times has an occupant of the Oval Office seemed to reject so thoroughly the nostrum that a president’s duty is to bring the country together.
    — NBC News, 25 Sep. 2017
  • More books, based on the Course, followed at a regular clip — at least six have climbed the New York Times best-seller list — each offering nostrums on the curative power of thought.
    — Sam Kestenbaum, New York Times, 5 July 2019
  • Worthless nostrums such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin have been promoted based on transparently bogus evidence.
    — Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 11 Apr. 2023
  • The nostrums of 12-step recovery, even with Emma resisting them bitterly, are not inherently dramatic.
    — Jesse Green, New York Times, 25 Oct. 2017
  • Talmadge was a reactionary who had come to big business’ notice by promoting such crude anti-labor nostrums as concentration camps for strikers and moving on to attacks on New Deal reforms.
    — Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 27 Sep. 2019
  • The implications for Social Security reform nostrums are major.
    — Michael Hiltzik, latimes.com, 25 Apr. 2018
  • Wayne was married three times and aged into a parody of himself, playing slight variations on the same role while in his political life spouting Bircher-ish nostrums about patriotism as compensation for his guilt over not fighting in the war.
    — Scott Stossel, WSJ, 15 Dec. 2017
  • That’s because the agency’s duty is to stand in the way of businesses desiring to push unsafe and ineffective nostrums at unwary consumers, and also in the way of a perverse idea that personal freedom includes the freedom to be gulled by charlatans.
    — Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 27 Sep. 2023
  • That’s because the agency’s duty is to stand in the way of businesses desiring to push unsafe and ineffective nostrums at unwary consumers, and also in the way of a perverse idea that personal freedom includes the freedom to be gulled by charlatans.
    — Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 17 Jan. 2025
  • Because of the false but persistent and powerfully seductive nostrum that reducing the value of a country’s currency will stimulate its economy by making its exports cheaper and its imports more expensive.
    — Steve Forbes, Forbes.com, 29 Jan. 2026
  • In short, a substantial share of right-leaning voters in this country were willing to embrace, or at least countenance, a brand of conservative politics with fewer free-market nostrums and more appeals to potent sociocultural anxieties.
    — Osita Nwanevu, The New Yorker, 21 July 2019
  • Alas, Goop's success is yet another example of how hawking misinformation, pseudoscience, and nostrum to the disaffected is extremely lucrative.
    — Beth Mole, Ars Technica, 2 Feb. 2022
  • Cohen and DeLong titled their book Concrete Economics to distinguish their ideas from the purely abstract, empirically untethered nostrums of the unfettered free market.
    — Win McCormack, The New Republic, 20 June 2019

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'nostrum.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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