POLLYANNA: a person characterized by irrepressible optimism and a tendency to find good in everything
In her 1913 novel Pollyanna, American author Eleanor Hodgman Porter introduced an orphan whose father had taught her "to find something about everything to be glad about." Pollyanna called her goodness quests the "just being glad game," and she played it to the hilt. The characters in the book admired Pollyanna's ability to look on the bright side, but in the real world people often find such excessive optimism a bit nauseating. That more cynical attitude toward extreme cheerfulness prompted people to start using the character's name as a term for anyone given to blind optimism and what some writers called "sentimental rot."
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