milk-and-water vs sterile

milk-and-water

adj
  • Insipid, wishy-washy, weak. 

noun
  • Something insipid or mawkish. 

sterile

adj
  • Fruitless, uninspiring, or unproductive. 

  • Terse; lacking sentiment or emotional stimulation, as in a manner of speaking. 

  • Unable to reproduce (or procreate). 

  • Of weapons: foreign-made and untraceable to the United States. 

  • Germless; free from all living or viable microorganisms. 

  • Free from dangerous objects, as a zone in an airport that can be only be entered via a security checkpoint. 

How often have the words milk-and-water and sterile occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )