candify

English

Etymology

candy +‎ -fy

Verb

candify (third-person singular simple present candifies, present participle candifying, simple past and past participle candified)

1. (transitive, archaic) To candy.
   • 1872, Susan Coolidge, What Katy Did:

     […] seven little pies—molasses pies, baked in saucers—each with a brown top and crisp candified edge, which tasted like toffy and lemon-peel, and all sorts of good things mixed up together.

   • 1875, Bee-keeper's Magazine:

     The candifying or granulating of extracted honey has also been a hinderance and great draw back to its introduction and use.

2. (transitive, figurative, sometimes derogatory) To make sweet or saccharine at the expense of serious meaning.
   • 1994, United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. Subcommittee on Public Lands, National Parks, and Forests, Workshop and hearing on New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park:

     Jazz was not always an accepted music, and, of course, today we have the problem of remaining faithful to the cultural roots of jazz, not just candifying, Disneyfying the music.

   • 1998, John D. Seelye, Memory's nation: the place of Plymouth Rock, page 21:

     They have become democratized into an item of popular consumption, perhaps a more gritty comestible than the candified menu served up in Disneyland's version of the American past...

   • 2008 March 15, Bernard Holland, “Ravel: A Bit Wicked, a Bit Nostalgic”, in New York Times‎^[1]:

     A minor misfortune of Ravel’s legacy is the relative obscurity of his best piano pieces and the prominence of their candified orchestral versions.