Definition of "bromide"

“How fortunate Buddha, Mahomed, and Shakespeare were that their kind relations and doctors did not cure them of their ecstasy and their inspiration,” said Kovrin. “If Mahomed had taken bromide for his nerves, had worked only two hours out of the twenty-four, and had drunk milk, that remarkable man would have left no more trace after him than his dog. […] ”

1894, Anton Chekhov, translated by Constance Garnett, The Black Monk‎, published 1917

The bromide conforms to everything sanctioned by the majority, and may be depended upon to be trite, banal, and arbitrary.

1906, Frank Gelett Burgess, Are You A Bromide?‎

No organicist metaphor, no irrelevant bromide that "we are all part of one another," must be permitted to obscure this basic fact.

1974, Murray Newton Rothbard, “What the State Is Not”, in Anatomy of the State

Certainly not Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who is clearly the Rupert Murdoch of his generation. He’s always justifying his cowardly choices with vacuous bromides about “free speech,” but he’s obviously just in it for the money — no matter how much his platform is used to destroy our democracy.

2020 June 2, Thomas L. Friedman, “America, We Break It, It’s Gone”, in New York Times‎