Of Lordly acquaintance you boast,
And the Dukes that you dined with yestreen;
Yet an insect’s an insect at most,
Tho’ it crawl on the curl of a Queen!
But what wonderful words: toadying and sycophancy. Where do they come from?
One dictionary definition gives this delightful word history:
The earliest recorded sense (around 1690) of toady is “a little or young toad,” but this has nothing to do with the modern usage of the word. The modern sense has rather to do with the practice of certain quacks or charlatans who claimed that they could draw out poisons. Toads were thought to be poisonous, so these charlatans would have an attendant eat or pretend to eat a toad and then claim to extract the poison from the attendant. Since eating a toad is an unpleasant job, these attendants came to epitomize the type of person who would do anything for a superior, and toadeater (first recorded 1629) became the name for a flattering, fawning parasite. Toadeater and the verb derived from it, toadeat,influenced the sense of the noun and verb toad and the noun toady, so that both nouns could mean “sycophant” and the verb toady could mean “to act like a toady to someone.”
I am not sure if this is true. But if it is, am an appalled that such techniques for quackery promotion do not go on today. The quacks of today have lost their bottle. Who would not delight in seeing a homeopath getting their Saturday intern doing a floor demonstration in Boots the Chemist by eating a live toad and then taking some Nux Vom to ensure she does not throw up. There would be queues around the block to see that, and I would be so impressed I would buy the sugar pills. And, of course, Roger Daltry on stage eating toads in front of Prince Charles whilst singing a medley of hits from Tommy would have really hit the headlines.
The etymology of sycophant may be a little harder and require some Latin and Greek.
My own personal favourite usage of the word appears in the film “101 Dalmatians” when Glenn Close’s Cruella de Vil berates her manservant by saying “What sort of sycophant do you think you are?”. To which he replies, “What sort of sycophant would you like me to be?”
We are told that the word is derived from συκος sykos, “fig”, and φανης fanēs, “to show” so basically sycophant is someone who shows figs. Not a lot of sense there. One explanation is that,
the Greek suko-phantes, “fig-blabbers.” The men of Athens passed a law forbidding the exportation of figs; the law was little more than a dead letter, but there were always found mean fellows who, for their own private ends, impeached those who violated it; hence sycophant came to signify first a government toady, and then a toady generally.
Do we believe that? The Oxford English Dictionary disputes this explanation and instead offers that it comes from an obscene gesture of “sticking the thumb between two fingers” in the shape of a fig. We are told that “The story goes that prominent politicians in ancient Greece held aloof from such inflammatory gestures, but privately urged their followers to taunt their opponents.”
Why this is obscene may be reflected in the fact that sykon has an alternative meaning of vulva.
On that note, I think we had better leave it there.