lick-trencher

English

Etymology

From lick +‎ trencher. Compare lick-dish, lick-plate, lick-platter.

Noun

lick-trencher (plural lick-trenchers)

1. (obsolete) A sycophant
   • 1595, W. W., transl., Menechmus, translation of Menaechmi by Titus Maccius Plautus, act 2, scene 1; republished as Shakespeare's Library, volume 5, London: Reeves and Turner, 1875, page 12:

     Why Peniculus worship, that whorson lick-trencher, your Parasiticall attendant.

   • 1860 May, “William Hogarth: Painter, Engraver, and Philosopher—IV. The Painter's Progress”, in Cornhill Magazine, pages 565–566:

     The earliest known picture of William Hogarth is one called the Wanstead Assembly, long, and by a ridiculous blunder, corrupted into "Wandsworth." The term "Assembly" was a little bit of art-slang. A portrait being a portrait, and a "conversation" a group of persons generally belonging to one family; by an "assembly" was understood a kind of pictorial rent-roll, or domestic "achievement," representing the lord, or the squire, the ladies and children, the secretaries, chaplains, pensioned poets, led-captains, body-flatterers, hangers-on, needy clients, lick-trenchers, and scrape-plates, the governesses and tutors, the tenants, the lacqueys, the black-boys, the monkeys, and the lapdogs: tutta la baracca, in fact.

Synonyms

• See also Thesaurus:sycophant