lickpot
nounEtymology From Middle English likpot; equivalent to lick + pot, presumably from the act of using a finger to clean a pot after eating.
- Coordinate term: thumbkin
- Fife-men and pipers braw, Merry deils, tak them a', Gown, lace, and livery — lickpot and ladle ; Jockey shall wear the hood, Jenny the sark of God — For codpiece and petticoat, dishclout and daidle.1820, The Edinburgh Review - Volume 34, page 156:
3 more examples
- Everyone said, "Oh," and held up the finger we call "lickpot," and nodded his head.1955, Hans Christian Andersen, Six fairy tales by the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen:
- No, only little Peter Playman; dear Thumbkin, Lickpot, and Longman were grabbing hardness under the gray cloth, shaping the flat oblong of hardness.1970, Harriette Louisa Simpson Arnow, The weedkiller's daughter, page 356:
- The use of the index finger to scoop the remaining juices from the cooking pot up to the lips gave it the finely appropriate name of 'the lickpot.'2008, Peter C. D. Brears, Cooking and Dining in Medieval England, page 214:
2
An untrustworthy sycophant.
- . And the message that came was by the mouth of a kind of jackal or lickpot of John Dick's — who, for reasons of his own, hated me, chiefly because I took no share in the foulness of him and his subservient crew.1896, Samuel Rutherford Crockett, The Grey Man - Volume 1, page 114:
- Maybe ye'll not have another chance before the gallows gets ye ! Off with ye now, for a dirty fingered, lickpot sneak, or I'll break the fiddle over the shoulders of ye!"1911, Maurice Hewlett, The Song of Renny, page 215:
2 more examples
- Piso is a peasant, Cyrus a cowherd, Brutus and Cassius landsurveyors, Demosthenes a vine-dresser, Fabius a threader of beads, Artaxerxes a ropemaker, Æneas a miller, Achilles a scurvy pate, Agamemnon a lickpot, Ulysses a haymower, Nestor a beggar, Ancus Martius a shiptrimmer. . . .1929, Anatole France, Rabelais, page 98:
- And, being no lickpot, would be left to watch the breakfast-porridge while the Sisters and Catechists went to Mass with the pupils of the school, on the benches of which young Boengabadu maintained isolated pre-eminence as a genuine Aboriginal converted from utterest heathenry, by the efforts of Pere St. Xavier and Pere Amable-Marie.1932, Richard Dehan, Dead Pearls: A Novel of the Great Wide West, page 195: