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Chris -- 2018-04-11
The term “playing lip service” can be found all over the Internet – a Google search returns 841 entries, indicating it is quite commonly (mis)used. “Paying lip serviceâ€, returns 366,000 entries. Interestingly, 29 entries are returned for pages where both terms are used.
This is from Wikipedia:
Lip service is the name of the situation in which someone complies with a certain obligation, or expectation, they have been subjected to, to the minimum possible extent. People paying lip service usually do so because they have no intention to comply any more than they are forced to. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lip_service>
Another example: give/pay lip service to something
to say that you agree with and support an idea or plan but not do anything to help it to succeed. The company pays lip service to the notion of racial equality but you look around you and all you see are white faces.
<http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/paying+lip+service>
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From a reader’s comment to an article in today’s Salon, about a nanny: “She never played lip service to the whiny needs of we yuppie moms—she was always no-nonsense, extremely reliable, and full of wry humor, if occasionally somewhat detached and cool.” I can’t quite make out what the reader understands “lip service” to mean—genuine deference, apparently. We will pass over “of we yuppie moms” in silence. . . [BTW, what’s the name of the rhetorical figure in which you mention something while pretending not to mention it?]
Of course I imagined I’d found a new eggcorn. Now up to 4,391 g-hits, from 841!
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Probably “she never paid even lip serviceâ€, i.e. “she never felt herself obligated to kowtow, as most people would in her situation, to the extent of at least talking like she thought the whiny needs of we [sic(k)] yuppie moms were legitimate.â€
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2009-03-07 08:44:16)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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To my Italian girlfriend, there is no audible difference between the words “it” and “eat”. Thus I went looking for and found the following variation on lip service. The sense remains the same
The G8 leaders have paid leap-service to poverty alleviation world-wide (assets.panda.org/downloads/G8genoafailure.doc)
We will not waist any time to ensure that councillors are accountable to the community … we will have to ensure that accountability is not only paid leap service but is practiced. (http://www.info.gov.za/speeches/2004/04062509451001.htm)
he also paid leap service to making SAFTA functional within the scheduled timeframe (http://www.saag.org/common/uploaded_fil … r1626.html)
You can see the sense in which it is used here:
Governments after governments neglect this very important road, the recent ones just pay leap service to it. They leap-frog anytime they fill like working on the road, leaving too many portholes on the short engineered portion of the road. Please, please, please as march as this would cost you, try hard and open this road and you will never regret. (http://topics.myjoyonline.com/news/comm … ntid=26138)
Besides leap service, I think portholes is a typo, but oddly enough, as march as reflects a common switch from much to march. “Thank you very march” is one of those inexplicable 32,000,000 ughits phrases, originating largely from Asia. Hard to say what the users are thinking if they know the meaning of the word march; it may once again be a malapropism. The lack of distinction between i and e is reflected as well in “anytime they fill like”.
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