toady
/ˈtəʊdi
/- Radio stations lend their microphones to these degenerate rappers who start wars on the air that end up affecting all their sycophants, toadies and lackeys who want to keep it real.
- Never has America been so thoroughly in the clutches of fawners, lap dogs, toadies, boot lickers, lick spittles, and Snopses.
Synonyms
- After a career spent shamelessly toadying to corporate interests, I will spend my retirement feeding the homeless.
- The Beard Liberation Front is not doing itself, or its cause, any favours by toadying to those who lack the conviction to sprout a decent set of whiskers and grow the full monty.
- By toadying to the royal family of Crim Tartary, she was lady-in-waiting to the young Princess Angelica.
Synonyms
Derivatives
toadyish
- But the government's toadyish diplomacy, which overlooked the key issue affecting its relations with North Korea, led to a delay in resolving the abduction cases and resulted in tragic consequences.
- But I doubt if even the most toadyish East European regime would be willing to accept serious casualties.
- Plus citing Authorities in the very first sentence just feels so very toadyish.
toadyism
- These two behaviors of subordination and aggressive domination, toadyism and the symbolic rape of reputations, are referred to here in their most extreme form.
- As the pressures have increased, toadyism has increased.
- The failed March First Movement taught us that in order to win our fight for independence and freedom, we must have effective revolutionary leadership and organizational structures; we must use the right tactics and strategies; and we must debunk toadyism and build up our strength on our own.
Origin
Early 19th century: said to be a contraction of toad-eater, a charlatan's assistant who ate toads; toads were regarded as poisonous, and the assistant's survival was thought to be due to the efficacy of the charlatan's remedy.
In the 17th century unscrupulous charlatans and quacks would try to sell their supposed remedies by demonstrating their powers. One technique was to have an assistant take the quack medicine and then eat, or pretend to eat, a toad—people thought that toads were poisonous and so were likely to attribute the assistant's survival to the charlatan's wares. Such an assistant was a toad-eater. In the 18th century the word also came to mean ‘a fawning flatterer’, and in the early 19th this was shortened to toady. Toad is an Old English word, and toadstool late Middle English apparently from the plant being the right size and shape to be a toad's stool.