lick and a promise

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a lick and a promise

1. (idiomatic) A quick, not-very-thorough wash.
   • 2007, Joy Dettman, One Sunday:

     She'd given her face a lick and a promise, drawn her hair back tight and walked in.

   • 2010, Nina Ansley, The Plague of Provence, page 47:

     He never felt quite clean with “cat baths”—as Marcel called them, or “a lick and a promise,” the way Renaud put it.

   • 2014, Margaret Weis, Robert Krammes, The Seventh Sigil:

     She had not had time for a proper bath in the week since this journey had begun. She had been forced to bathe in the washbasins of the inns along the route, giving herself what her old nursemaid would have called “a lick and a promise.”

2. (by extension, idiomatic) The hasty or incomplete performance of a task.
   • 1955, Max Shulman, Robert Paul Smith, The Tender Trap: A Comedy‎, page 14:

     Now this is not the way to get a house in order. What this place needs is a real thorough old-fashioned cleaning. A lick and a promise won't do, no, sir!

   • 2000, Mary Higgins Clark, While My Pretty One Sleeps‎:

     The snowplows had made what Myles would call a lick-and-a-promise attempt to partially clear the accumulated snow from West End Avenue.

   • 2013, David Jeremiah, God in You: Releasing the Power of the Holy Spirit in Your Life:

     Well, he knows hes supposed to make his bed before he goes to school, so he gives it a lick and a promise and walks out of the room.

   • 2014 May 22, “EDITORIAL: India's Modi wins voter mandate for economic growth”, in Washington Times:

     Rising out of poverty will require not a lick and a promise but deep reform.

   • 2014, Timothy Schaffert, The Swan Gondola, page 74:

     Workers scrambled to slap it all together on nothing but a lick and a promise—unlike the pristine whiteness of the court, the haphazard shacks ahead clashed in color and stripe, some tall, some short, each roof at an awkward angle to the other.