Meaning
A flatterer - someone who curries favour with a superior by attentiveness, gifts, and relentless helpfulness. The schoolroom gave the insult its image: the pupil arriving with a polished apple for the desk. Disapproving but light; near-neighbours include teacher's pet (the person) and brown-nose (the coarser verb). Regional use: General English; American origin.
Origin
The apple-for-the-teacher custom was old when American slang finally named its exploiters: the earliest figurative use on record is the Chester Times of 30 November 1918, reporting a Princeton address in which President Nicholas Murray Butler deplored an era that idealized highly accomplished apple-polishers and pencil-sharpeners. The verbal noun followed: the Los Angeles Times of 21 February 1926 carried David Starr Jordan's review explaining that in local academic slang conversation with pupils is known as apple polishing - no president, he added, had the nerve to ask which is the apple and who contributes the polish. A Brooklyn piece of the same year kept the origin visible, describing the teacher's pet who brings her a rosy apple. Wiktionary's standing definition - a sycophant, a toady, from the obsequious child bringing apples to the class teacher - shows the insult fully detached from the fruit bowl.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- apple polishing
- apple-polish
- polish the apple
Usage Examples
- The new director arrived with no programme, only an apple polisher's instinct for the chairman's tea order.
- Regional managers called the quarterly audit apple-polishing season; headquarters called it engagement.
- He apple-polished so smoothly that the board genuinely believed the minutes were his idea.