curry favor

• curry favour (British and Commonwealth)

Originally from a French poem Roman de Fauvel, written in the early 1300s; Fauvel was a conniving stallion, and the play was a satire on the corruption of social life. The name Fauvel points to the French fauve ('chestnut, reddish-yellow, or fawn'), another sense of fauve meaning the class of wild animals whose coats are at least partly brown, and the medieval belief that a fallow horse was a symbol of deceit and dishonesty. The phrase curry Fauvel, then, referred to currying (or combing) the horse, and was turned by later speakers into curry favor.

• Audio (AU)

  (file)

curry favor

1. (idiomatic) To seek to gain favor by flattery or attention.
   • 2019 May 5, Danette Chavez, “Campaigns are waged on and off the Game Of Thrones battlefield (newbies)”, in The A.V. Club‎:

     Unlike Sansa, Daenerys can’t rely on her family name to curry favor; unlike Jon or even Arya, she can’t regale the Northerners with tales of exploits, though that’s probably for the best when it comes to her “liberating” Yunkai and Meereen

• “Curry favor” in Michael Quinion, Ballyhoo, Buckaroo, and Spuds: Ingenious Tales of Words and Their Origins, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books in association with Penguin Books, 2004, →ISBN.
• "Curry your favor" from Green band, Album Green, 1986.