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gild the lily
- To adorn unnecessarily something that is already beautiful or perfect: “Morty had us all believing his tall tale until he couldn't resist gilding the lily.”
Idioms and Phrases
Add unnecessary adornment or supposed improvement. For example, Offering three different desserts after that elaborate meal would be gilding the lily . This expression is a condensation of Shakespeare's metaphor in King John (4:2): “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily ... is wasteful and ridiculous excess.” [c. 1800]Example Sentences
Then he tried to gild the lily by saying the Great Depression would have never happened if there had been tariffs at the time.
But in a way, all the giveaways and special events are just gilding the lily.
So here’s my Nana’s original no-frills recipe, without any fuss, any tweaks or anything to gild the lily.
“The challenge of it was to try to go to that place but not gild the lily too much,” Scott says.
“There’s enough in the actual facts that you don’t have to gild the lily and go overboard. That’s when they might risk turning off the independent-minded viewers who don’t like Trump.”
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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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