curry favor
verbEtymology
Originally from a French poem Roman de Fauvel, written in the early 1300s; Fauvel was a conniving stallion, and the play was a satire on the corruption of social life. The name Fauvel points to the French fauve (“chestnut, reddish-yellow, or fawn”), another sense of fauve meaning the class of wild animals whose coats are at least partly brown, and the medieval belief that a fallow horse was a symbol of deceit and dishonesty. The phrase curry Fauvel, then, referred to currying (“combing”) the horse, and was altered (as folk etymology) by later speakers to curry favor.
Definitions
To seek to gain favor by flattery or attention.
- […]always promising to pay, promising to pay, tomorrow, and dying today, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offences;[…]
- Other people would say so, and would allege that he was currying favor with Bulstrode for the sake of making himself important and getting on in the world.
- Poor old Uncle Silas—why, it’s pitiful, him trying to curry favor that way—so hard pushed and poor, and yet hiring that useless Jubiter Dunlap to please his ornery brother.
The neighborhood
Vish — recursive loop
No curated loop yet for curry favor. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.
sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA