Placemen who stick to their offices but do little work, like the barnacles which live on the ship but impede its progress.
“The redundants would be ‘Barnaclesʹ with a vengeance … and the work be all the worse done for these hangers-on.”—Nineteenth Century (August, 1888, p. 280).
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Entry taken from Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, edited by the Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D. and revised in 1895.
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