soft-pedal vs sugar soap

soft-pedal

verb
  • To attempt to persuade someone about (something) through understatement, so that the listener accepts the good points as obvious. 

  • To reduce the force or impact of (something); to damp, to mute; especially, to minimize the less desirable aspects of (something); to play down, to tone down. 

  • To reduce the volume of (music, a sound, etc.). 

  • Chiefly followed by on: to act in a less assertive or forceful manner. 

sugar soap

noun
  • An extremely powerful detergent used for washing surfaces prior to painting. 

How often have the words soft-pedal and sugar soap occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )