A lickspittle is a contemptible flatterer of the powerful. A pack of lickspittles, that lickspittle, lickspittle journalism.
It is one of the most vivid insults in English and describes exactly what it says. It belongs to political abuse and to nineteenth-century writing, and anybody who uses it now is reaching deliberately for something with more force than sycophant.
1nounlickspittleA contemptible flatterer of the powerful.
“The minister surrounded himself with lickspittles who never dared to disagree with him.”
lickspittle is an insult.
Lick plus spittle, a compound of exactly the picture it paints.
Built from
A compounding: lick (“pass one’s tongue over”) + spittle (“saliva”); the verb may derive by back-formation from the nominal derivation lickspittling (see below).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire