Visual Dictionary: Lackey
Welcome to Visual Dictionary, a series of posts about words that are better expressed in pictures.
Need your coffee made for you? This guy is a lackey.
There are myriad English words for what most of us would call a “brown-noser” or “kiss-up” — that is, a “servile flatterer.” (A thesaurus entry gave some more colorful slang terms: apple-polisher, bootlicker, teacher’s pet, yes-man).
Here are some more GRE-likely words for a total brown-nosing bootlicker:
A factotum isn’t necessarily so negative; it simply refers to someone who does menial work (we might call such a person a “gofer”). Same with an underling.
A myrmidon doesn’t necessarily flatter, but he or she does follow orders without question. The original Myrmidons were Achilles’ soldiers in the Trojan War; Zeus made them from ants. Ants!
Some related verbs are:
- Blandish – To coax or influence by flattery. (This word isn’t so negative. You might use blandishments to get your spouse to mow the lawn).
- Fawn – To seek notice or favor through servile behavior or flattery.
- Kowtow – Literally, to touch your forehead to the ground while kneeling. So, you get the metaphor.
- Truckle – To submit or yield in an obsequious way. In other words, to be totally pathetic.
- Slaver – To fawn (or also, to drool).
The boss laughed to the visiting coffee-machine saleswoman. “I don’t make my own coffee, little lady!” he said. “I have my lackeys for that!”
He didn’t realize his temp worker had heard him, but, after three months of being treated like a factotum, she wasn’t willing to truckle to his insults.
For the next few days, she pretended to fawn: “Oh, that new tie makes you look so powerful,” she said. “Your last Powerpoint presentation was really inspiring.”
But really, she was just throwing him off her scent: if his coffee kind of tasted like it had been brewed through a filter that had spent some time in the men’s room urinal, he’d never suspect his loyal myrmidon.
“That’s what he gets for expecting me to be his kowtowing toady,” she thought. “What do I care? Now that I have such a prodigious lexicon, I’ll be off to grad school in no time.”