obsequious
adjective

- excessively compliant or deferential; obedient to an excessive or servile degree.

- too eager to praise or serve someone, especially someone in a position of authority, in a way that does not seem genuine.

- obsequious people are overly eager to do what other people want and are full of excessive flattery and compliance. Used with strong disapproval.

Merriam-Webster, Cambridge English Dictionary, Collins English Dictionary

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WORD ORIGIN

Obsequious started life as a perfectly neutral word — and it took several centuries to turn into an insult.

It comes from Latin obsequiosus, meaning compliant or yielding, derived from obsequium — the act of following someone's wishes. The root verb is obsequi: ob- (towards) + sequi (to follow). The same Latin root gives us sequel and sequence.

In the 15th century, when the word entered English, it simply meant dutiful or willing to serve. There was nothing wrong with it. A good servant was obsequious. A loyal soldier was obsequious. Even funerary rites were once called obsequies — the ceremonies of following someone to the grave — and that word still exists in formal English today.

The shift happened gradually during the 16th and 17th centuries, as writers began using obsequious to describe people who took compliance too far — who followed not out of loyalty but out of calculation. Shakespeare used it in precisely this way. By the 18th century, the negative connotation had largely won, and the neutral sense had faded.

Today the word is almost always critical. The interesting thing is that nothing in the original Latin justified that judgement. The word changed its meaning not because the language changed, but because people's attitudes to excessive deference changed with it.

Helga & Paul Smith

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OBSEQUIOUSNESS DOESN'T PAY

During an illness early in Caligula’s reign, a commoner vowed to give his own life if the emperor recovered. The man made the promise publicly, hoping through his extravagant offer to show his deep loyalty and to elicit a generous award. Although Caligula did recover, the tactic backfired spectacularly. Once back on his feet, Caligula chose to take the man at his word and ordered his execution.

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SYNONYMS

adulatory, all smiles and no spine, apple-polishing, ass-kissing, at someone's beck and call, beggarly, bend over backwards to please, blarneying, bootlicking, bow and scrape, bowing and scraping, brown-nosing, buttering-up, cap in hand, compliance, compliant, crawling, cringing, currying favour, dance to someone's tune, dancing attendance on someone, deferential, eat out of someone's hand, empty flattery, enslaved, fall over oneself to agree, fawning, flannelling, flattering, forelock-tugging, grovelling, gushing, hang on someone's every word, hollow praise, honey-tongued, ingratiating, kiss the boss's boots, know which side one's bread is buttered, kowtowing, lackeying, lay it on thick, licking someone's boots, lickspittle, mealy-mouthed, menial, OBSEQUIOUS, oily, oleaginous, on bended knee, over-accommodating, overly flattering, people-pleasing, playing up to someone, prostrate, pull one's forelock, roll over, run rings around the truth to please, say whatever you want to hear, self-abasing, servile, sing someone's praises (insincerely), slavish, smarmy, snivelling, soft-soaping, spineless, submissive, subservient, suckholing, sucking up, supplicatory, sycophantic, teacher's pet, tell people what they want to hear, toadying, too keen to please, truckling, tug one's forelock, unctuous, Uriah Heepish, wheedling, yes-man

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SMUGGLE OWAD into a conversation today, say something like:

“Have you noticed how LLMs like ChatGPT can have an annoying OBSEQUIOUS tone when answering questions.”

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