"Lay it on with a trowel" nghĩa là gì?

"Lay it on thick/with a trowel" có trowel là cái bay -> cụm từ này nghĩa là phóng đại; thổi phồng, tán dương hết lời; quan trọng hóa vấn đề; phản ứng thái quá.

Ví dụ

President Donald Trump appears to belong to what might be called the Benjamin Disraeli school of diplomacy. The British prime minister once counseled, “Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.”

Every country and every leader tried to work out how to deal with Trump. Elaborate psychological (thuộc tâm lý) analyses were written in foreign capitals (tư bản nước ngoài)– including our own. The general conclusion was that Trump was a narcissist (ái kỷ) who’d respond well to flattery (tâng bốc, xu nịnh). ‘Lay it on with a trowel’ was the consensus (sự đồng tâm/nhất trí), echoing former British PM Benjamin Disraeli’s advice on how to deal with royalty.

His great trick is that, unlike the Leichner makeup he favoured as a young man, he does not lay it on with a trowel. When he undercuts his sincerity – tenderness (tính mềm yếu, mỏng manh) is always hotly pursued by a barb – it only serves to make his narrative the more heartfelt. (“Syphilis (bệnh giang mai) probably, but at the thrilling stage,” he notes, finally, of a moment when, about to go on stage as Wilde in a production of David Hare’s play The Judas Kiss, he suddenly has the sense that “the whole universe has stopped in its tracks”.)

Bài trước: "How's with you?" nghĩa là gì?