lip service
- 1Talk that sounds supportive or promising but is empty, with no action or real intention behind it.
Many companies pay lip service to diversity while their leadership stays exactly the same.
Staff dismissed the new wellness policy as lip service from management.
Similartokenism
Note
An old phrase in modern clothes: it first appears around 1590, in Henry Holland's A Treatise against Witchcraft. It usually takes to, naming what is honored only in words, so a candidate gives lip service to fixing problems and a company pays lip service to diversity. Just as often it turns into a doubt, as when a voter prays that a promise is not just lip service.
- 2Cunnilingus; oral sex performed on a woman.
Similarhead
Note
This is vulgar slang, at home in crude jokes among friends and out of place almost anywhere else. It usually comes with give, and the shorter giving lip means the same. Outside a plainly sexual context, listeners will hear the everyday empty-talk meaning instead.
Practice
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Origin
First used c. 1590, in Henry Holland's A Treatise against Witchcraft; compare the earlier lip-labour.