Dear John,

You are quite correct about that devilish old Facebook. This morning I woke up, scrolled through my friend's posts and landed up here:

The word mawkish is interesting. This word leaped into my poor tired brain after a brief scan of my Facebook newsfeed made me briefly want to hurl. Anyway, it appears to refer to both a schmaltzy emotion and an unpleasant flavor, although there is no emotion or flavor called "mawk." In my very literal brain, if one is going to be mawk-ish, one should have some psychological or gustatory equivalent of "mawk." Turns out we don't have one, (although there is a programming language called Mawk which I have to believe does not inspire either copious weeping or projectile vomiting). So I looked up the derivation of the word and Merriam-Webster thinks it is "probably" derived from the old Norse word for "maggot" although the word was first used in 1697 when presumably most Old Norsemen were long dead. Who revived the word and why? This was post-Old-Norsemen and pre-Facebook. What happened in 1697 that inspired someone to make up a word that can be used to describe both an "insipid" flavor and excessive sentimentality? And why is this word derived from the Old Norse word for fly larvae? Does this presume that the inventor has either sampled fly larvae and found it to be unpleasant or had an emotion which he felt resembled the psychological state of a prepubescent insect?
Note to self: Do not think before coffee. It only brings heartache and brain freeze.