forced feeding
- noun
- Offensive
:
alimentación forzada
- Imagine that you survive the forced-feeding, and that as your attacker leaves you, either in the place of attack or having dropped you off somewhere to make your own way home, they mock you by talking about how wonderful your favorite dessert tasted, and how lucky you were that they gave you more of it than you'd ever had before.
Examples
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As I lie in bed, my eyes closed, certain that it's early morning and almost time to get up, I feel warm and weightless as if I'm deciding whether or not I want to be born into a world of forced feeding, tubes, breathing, diapers, being put to bed, and being awakened.
Fiction book (1997) -
Should they supervise forced feedings of Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike, per government orders, or heed their medical association's ruling against a practice it calls a form of torture?
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Before long, through the wall, I heard the sounds of forced feeding in the cell next to mine.
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She felt confusion as she ate, one part of her enjoying the experience as if she were young and being cared for, another part of her protesting every bite, screaming in horror at what this forced feeding was doing to her carefully established control, and another, more primitive part full of a hunger so deep that even this excess.
Fiction book (1995) -
Documented, culturally sanctioned behaviors ranged from extreme passivity, in which a mother puts a bowl of food in front of a child and walks away, to high control, in which an extreme example is forced feeding: a mother forces her child to swallow by putting food into the mouth and holding the nose.
Academic text (2004) -
He'd had no choice in the matter; he was a prisoner subjected to daily forced feeding of an unpalatable mush.
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As a detainee at Guantanamo, Latif has participated in hunger strikes that necessitated forced feeding.
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly compositional: 'forced' = by coercion/necessity and 'feeding' = the act of providing food, so a learner who knows both words can infer it means feeding someone against their will or when they cannot eat. This follows a regular adjective + noun pattern found across languages and in everyday English, making the expression immediately understandable to a B1 learner.
Etymology
Forced feeding comes from the literal image of forced (made to) and feeding (giving food): a person is held and food or a tube is put into their mouth when they cannot or will not eat. So forced feeding means 'feeding someone by force' or giving nutrition when a person refuses or cannot eat.
