Meaning of lick and a promise | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A quick, not-very-thorough wash.
   idiomatic
2. The hasty or incomplete performance of a task.
   broadly, idiomatic

Equivalents

Examples

“She'd given her face a lick and a promise, drawn her hair back tight and walked in.”

“He never felt quite clean with “cat baths”—as Marcel called them, or “a lick and a promise,” the way Renaud put it.”

“She had not had time for a proper bath in the week since this journey had begun. She had been forced to bathe in the washbasins of the inns along the route, giving herself what her old nursemaid would have called “a lick and a promise.””

“Now this is not the way to get a house in order. What this place needs is a real thorough old-fashioned cleaning. A lick and a promise won't do, no, sir!”

“The snowplows had made what Myles would call a lick-and-a-promise attempt to partially clear the accumulated snow from West End Avenue.”

“Well, he knows hes supposed to make his bed before he goes to school, so he gives it a lick and a promise and walks out of the room.”

“Rising out of poverty will require not a lick and a promise but deep reform.”

“Workers scrambled to slap it all together on nothing but a lick and a promise—unlike the pristine whiteness of the court, the haphazard shacks ahead clashed in color and stripe, some tall, some short, each roof at an awkward angle to the other.”

CEFR level