An idiom is a colloquial expression whose meaning is not deduced from the words that form it, but which is nevertheless generally used in the appropriate context. It is a kind of popular wisdom that is often passed from generation to generation. There are examples galore in the vast catalog of proverbs, sayings and proverbial phrases. For example, this button: brown the pill.
The dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) offers two definitions of the phrase gilding the pill (for someone) that leaves no room for doubt:
Come on, to sugarcoat the pill is to prepare the way for giving bad news, taking detours to mitigate the damage that the receiver of the message is going to suffer: “Enough of the talk; you don’t need to give me the pill to tell me that you’re done.” you love Me”. And, taking into account the second meaning of the RAE, that of playing ball: “Rodolfo is sugarcoating the boss to get a raise in salary.”
When you think of a pill, you imagine that small capsule that contains medication to be ingested orally. It is a solution to mask the bad taste of the drug, since it is also mixed with an excipient, whose patent was registered in Paris in 1834 by the French pharmacist Mothes. However, the idiom pill has little to do with Mothes’.
And the origin of the phrase predates the 19th century, as reflected in two historical gems of the Spanish language from the 17th century. On the one hand, in the Treasure of the Castilian Language (1611), by Covarrubias, the term “pill” already appears with the following comment: “medicinal and purgative pellets that are taken by mouth, and apothecaries usually gild them to disguise the bitterness of the acibar that they carry inside, and thus the proverb golden pill remained, for the honorific places that they seem to covet so much and then become more bitter than a thousand galls.
For his part, Gonzalo Correas collects in his Vocabulary of sayings and proverbial phrases (1627) we find a similar phrase: “If the pill tasted good, they would not brown it on the outside.” The meaning of this phrase, now out of use, is the same as the expression that has survived to this day.
Likewise, Alberto Buitrago recovers in his book Dictionary of Sayings and Phrases, the satirical lyric of the poet Luis de Góngora Ándeme yo horne y se ríse la gente, written in 1581: “Eat on golden dishes / the prince with a thousand cares / like golden pills, / “That I on my poor table / want more blood sausage / that bursts on the grill / people laugh”.
Thus, camouflaging the bad taste of a medicine, covering it with a more appetizing flavor or colorful or golden pigments, is a task that apothecaries have been doing for several centuries. The phrase originated as a kind of metaphor for that pharmacological work: offering something bitter (bad news), but in a more attractive container to be ingested.
But how was the pill made golden? According to the Aramburu Museum Pharmacy, “the internal walls of a cylindrical container made of boxwood were covered with gold or silver leaf. The pills to be treated were placed in it, it was closed and for a time they had to move like a maracas. When finished the gold or silver leaves had disappeared and the pills were shown covered in gold or silver.”