spit and polish
1
7.0
- noun
- Informal
:
pulido
- - Let's have a little more spit and polish on those bayonets.
Examples
-
Look at you, all spit and polish with your shiny medals and your pretty ribbons.
-
The soldiers took great care to add some spit and polish to their uniforms before the parade.
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With some spit and polish, I really do think we could fix it up.
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Yeah, a little spit and polish, you can clean this up, sell it next year.
-
All in all, though, I enjoyed watching the matches, even if they could do with a little more spit and polish.
Blog text (32) -
He was military spit and polish down to the bone.
Fiction book (2001) -
It's the kind of thing that makes the co-worker's disorganized desk look like the spit and polish of a boot camp floor.
Blog text (19) -
The old car received a little spit and polish to make it look presentable for the show.
-
With a bit of spit and polish, the room transformed from cluttered to immaculate for the guests.
Synonyms
26
1.0
Being free from dirt and keeping things tidy
7
1.0
Being tidy and having things in order
Antonyms
How Neat
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is partly derivable: 'polish' clearly points to shining/refinement and 'spit' evokes the traditional (literal) practice of using spit to shine leather, so a learner could infer a sense of careful grooming or shine. However, the fixed idiomatic collocation and its conventional military connotations are not fully predictable from the constituents alone, making it only partially transparent to a B1 learner.
Etymology
The phrase spit and polish comes from a simple picture: soldiers would use a little spit and a cloth to make boots and buttons shine, a quick way to polish them. That's why it now means paying careful attention to being 'clean' and 'neat'.