PDA

View Full Version : Word of the Day ... sycophant



Les Shaw
07-13-2005, 01:34 PM
sycophant \SIK-uh-fuhnt\, noun:
<!-- WOTD="sycophant" -->A person who seeks favor by flattering people of wealth or influence; a parasite; a toady.


The praise Oxford received as a poet may simply have issued from the mouths of sycophants hungry for patronage.
--Howard Chua-Eoan and Helen Gibson, "The Bard's Beard?" Time (http://www.time.com/time/), February 15, 1999

Ivan IV established a new, much simplified officialdom and a court composed of sycophants and mercenaries.
--"Ivan IV, The Terrible." Encyclopedia Britannica (http://www.britannica.com/)

Some new interpretations of Zhou's role under Mao Zedong have him, at their most charitable, as a bumbling sycophant.
--"The Fight Over China's Future." The Economist (http://www.economist.com/), January 11, 1997

Friendship with the son and daughter-in-law of an imprisoned Supreme Court justice afforded me a special pipeline into high-level Ghanaian gossip about the alarming psychological condition of the head of state, said alternately to be suffering from delusions of grandeur fed by sycophants or to be reduced to quivering agoraphobia (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=agoraphobia) after the attempts on his life.
--David Levering Lewis, "Ghana, 1963." The American Scholar, Winter 1999

blinky
07-13-2005, 02:06 PM
or

the feeling an anteater has after ingesting large meal - "I'm sycophants, but as my name implies, they're all I eat"

Mouse
07-13-2005, 02:16 PM
There is a story here.

Please share??? :D

EDIT: As Gilda would say in this situation, "Nevermind". :hsh:

Bogie
07-13-2005, 02:27 PM
or
the feeling an anteater has after ingesting large meal - "I'm sycophants, but as my name implies, they're all I eat"
My type of dry humour :D .... my family shudders when I say something like that LOL
I'm "sick of ants"
:eri: