Lickspittle vs Null - What's the difference?
lickspittle | null |
A fawning toady; a base sycophant.
* 1857 , , The Professor , ch. 5:
* 1920 , , Poor White , ch. 21:
* 2013 May 23, "
(by extension) The practice of giving empty flattery for personal gain.
(transitive, and, intransitive) To play the toady; take the rôle of a lickspittle to please (someone).
* 1886 , (author), The Light Shines in Darkness , act 1:
A non-existent or empty value or set of values.
Zero]] quantity of [[expression, expressions; nothing.
Something that has no force or meaning.
(computing) the ASCII or Unicode character (), represented by a zero value, that indicates no character and is sometimes used as a string terminator.
(computing) the attribute of an entity that has no valid value.
One of the beads in nulled work.
(statistics) null hypothesis
Having no validity, "null and void"
insignificant
* 1924 , Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove :
absent or non-existent
(mathematics) of the null set
(mathematics) of or comprising a value of precisely zero
(genetics, of a mutation) causing a complete loss of gene function, amorphic.
As nouns the difference between lickspittle and null
is that lickspittle is a fawning toady; a base sycophant while null is zero, nil; the cardinal number before einn.As a verb lickspittle
is (transitive|and|intransitive) to play the toady; take the rôle of a lickspittle to please (someone).lickspittle
English
Alternative forms
* lick-spittleNoun
(en noun)- "I've found you out and know you thoroughly, you mean, whining lickspittle !"
- "You're a suck, a suck and a lickspittle , that's what you are," said the pale man, his voice trembling with passion.
Note to politicians: Stop blaming the media for your problems (Editorial)," Globe and Mail (Canada) (retrieved 23 May 2013):
- In Ottawa, Senator Marjory LeBreton claimed in a speech on Wednesday that allegations of spending abuses by her colleagues were “hyped-up media stories” that were inevitable in a “town populated by Liberal elites and their media lickspittles .”
Synonyms
* (fawning toady) brown noser, flatterer, sycophant, toadyDerived terms
* lickspittling (verbal noun)Verb
- "[Y]ou take his side, and that is wrong! . . . If some young school teacher, or some young lad, lickspittles to him, it's bad enough."
References
null
English
Noun
(en noun)- (Francis Bacon)
- Since no date of birth was entered for the patient, his age is null .
Adjective
(en adjective)- In proportion as we descend the social scale our snobbishness fastens on to mere nothings which are perhaps no more null than the distinctions observed by the aristocracy, but, being more obscure, more peculiar to the individual, take us more by surprise.