These verbs mean to treat someone with special favour, care, protectiveness or privilege. To pamper someone is to cater to him, to furnish him with everything he needs for ease or comfort: to pamper an invalid. Pamper may imply treatment so tender as to weakening or debilitating: an aristocracy so pampered and over-protected that it could not cope with change. Whereas to pamper someone is to lap him in luxury, to indulge him is to let him have what he wants or does as he likes. Indulgence involves making an exception, yielding to wishes or inclinations usually denied; it suggests a relaxing of normal or proper restraint and a permissive sanctioning of pleasure. A person may indulge himself or another person: indulging oneself in the luxury of sleeping late; a grandmother who indulges the children so much that she undermines parental discipline. Preferences, desires and needs may also be indulged : indulging a taste for wine to the point of insobriety. One humours only other people. To humour someone is to go along with him, complying with his moods, fancies or capricious demands, though they may seem silly.

• He humoured his wife and drove back to the house to see if the gas stove was turned off; Though tired, he pretended he was a comic-book hero to humour the child.

To baby someone is to treat him like a helpless infant who can’t act on his own or assume responsibility. To coddle a person is to treat him with much more solicitude than he warrants, going to great lengths to spare or protect him. Mollycoddle means much the same as coddle , but it is a stronger word particularly suggestive of the over-protection by which some mothers insulated their sons from experience and hardship, thus making them infantile or effeminate. Baby , coddle and mollycoddle are often used sarcastically or in exaggeration.

• They babied you in high school, but you’ll have to stand on your own two feet at university; You’re in the Army now, men, so don’t expect any coddling here; He claimed people on unemployment relief were being mollycoddled .

Alone among these verbs, spoil emphasizes effect, the damage to the disposition resulting from over-indulgence. According to folk psychology, one spoils a child by giving in to his whims and whinings, letting him have his way, according him privileges he hasn’t earned and doesn’t deserve; as a result, he may well come to demand special privileges as a matter of right, and may become self-centred, conceited and selfish.

• Stop acting like a spoilt child; His grandparents would spoil him if we let them.

An adult may be spoilt in a different way by growing used to unaccustomed luxuries, so that he can no longer be content with what he had before.

• Wintering on the Gold Coast has spoilt me.