pickthank

pickthank (plural pickthanks)

1. A sycophant; one who meddles, tattles, informs (often in order to curry favour).
   • c. 1597 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The First Part of Henry the Fourth, […]”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act III, scene ii]:

     Yet such extenuation let me beg,
     As, in reproof of many tales devised,
     which oft the ear of greatness needs must hear,
     By smiling pick-thanks and base news-mongers,
     I may, for some things true, wherein my youth
     Hath faulty wander’d and irregular,
     Find pardon on my true submission.

   • 1628, John Earle, Micro-cosmographie, or, A Piece of the World Discovered; in Essayes and Characters, Characters, 40. A rash man,

     He is a man still swayed with the first reports, and no man more in the power of a pickthank then he.

   • 1755, Eliza Haywood (under the pseudonym Exploralibus), The Invisible Spy, London: T. Garner, Volume 1, Chapter 7, p. 256,

     Why then, sir, your friend is no better than a pickthank for bringing you such idle stories; and I am not afraid to tell him so to his face.

   • 1868, F. H. Doyle, Lectures Delivered before the University of Oxford, London: Macmillan, Lecture 2, pp. 49-50,

     Some pickthank contrived to let the little great man know what had taken place, and he, so she informed me, was ungenerous enough to wreak a mean revenge.

pickthank (not comparable)

1. Of or relating to pickthanks.
   • 1599, Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday‎, act I, scene 1:

     This Dodger is mine uncle’s parasite,
     The arrant’st varlet that e’er breathed on earth;
     He sets more discord in a noble house
     By one day’s broaching of his pickthank tales,
     Than can be salved again in twenty years […]

   • 1930, Norman Lindsay, Redheap, Sydney, N.S.W.: Ure Smith, published 1965, →OCLC, page 107:

     Nevertheless, behind these pick-thank airs Mr. Bandparts was a mellowed man.

• pick-thank