sentimentalize
sentimentalise BrE

He refuses to sentimentalize baby love, which is an easy target.

But history here is never sentimentalized, and Paris keeps looking forward.

Unlike many of her contemporaries, she does not sentimentalize the South.

The book tries not to sentimentalize the past at the expense of the present.

We sentimentalize children, but they know what's real and what's not.

Still, in his effort not to sentimentalize the plight of black and poor people, the photographer goes too far the other way.

But what he doesn't do is sentimentalize any of this, a smart impulse.

A tougher film would have emphasized these themes more and sentimentalized the story less.

Calling on the country to care about its "kids," they say, can sentimentalize and obscure the underlying issues.

He does not need a lot of inflection, which would diminish and sentimentalize the effect.

I think it does, but to answer that question properly, you have to avoid the tendency to sentimentalize the past.

Not one to sentimentalize, he began by saying, "It's a pretty good soap opera."

He was not sitting in this concrete hideout to sentimentalize.

I do not mean to sentimentalize what it means to live a nomadic life in a barren land.

Ms. Wrong does not, however, oversimplify or sentimentalize the argument.

"Children Underground" goes out of its way not to sentimentalize its subjects.

Perhaps it is naïve to complain too much or to sentimentalize memory.

To show a young, handsome couple singing the lullaby together sentimentalizes the music and the moment.

"It does not need to be sentimentalized or romanticized."

But this is not an event that should be overly sentimentalized or glamorized.

If this brief summary suggests some roseate, sentimentalized view, think again.

Madonna Swan is not going to have her story sentimentalized or otherwise easily "understood."

To imply that the old village formed an organic unit is not to sentimentalize it.

Sentimentalize the music, and it chokes to a cloying halt.

The problem is that the plot, score and overall gloss of a complex period have all been sentimentalized.

If you try to sentimentalise Christmas, you take it into the non-real world.

As the years of the war continue to float downstream, releasing themselves from memory into history, it becomes increasingly easy to sentimentalise them.

Kellaway was a good chap, and remarkably adept at persuading drunks to go to bed, but he would sentimentalise so.

It is easy to sentimentalise the rise in extended family households (as one commentator recently gushed, "old fashioned family values are back in vogue").

The Edinburgh literati worked to sentimentalise Burns during his life and after his death, dismissing his education by calling him a "heaven-taught ploughman".

Comment The best of rivals Leader: It is important not to sentimentalise the Entente Cordiale of 1904 between Britain and France.

Burns became a cult figure because he was on the winning side, but appeared late enough on the scene to be able to sentimentalise the vanquished, thereby creating the illusion at least of being a national poet.