smell of the lamp

smell of the lamp

To show the signs of arduous, overwrought effort, and to lack freshness or vitality as a result. (Said especially of academic or literary work.) His thesis is meticulously crafted, but the paragraphs are so dry and calculated, and the paper lacks any flourish or style. As a whole, it rather smells of the lamp to me.
See also: lamp, of, smell
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

smell of the lamp

show signs of laborious study and effort.
The lamp here is an oil lamp, formerly used for night-time work or study.
See also: lamp, of, smell
Farlex Partner Idioms Dictionary
See also:
  • the smell of the lamp
  • get off on the right foot
  • get/start off on the right/wrong foot
  • on the right foot, get off
  • too much like hard work
  • (one's) nerves are shot
  • make hard work of (something)
  • make hard work of something
  • go about to (do something)
  • have too much on (one's) plate
References in periodicals archive
For all their charm, these verses smell of the lamp, albeit with some astonishing flickers: "Bushes adieu!
Sabine Sicaud. To Speak, To Tell You?
Although a man of scholarly bent, his novels do not smell of the lamp. He brought a fecund imagination to fiction and intuited the motives of great figures.
Ryotaro Shiba, in memorium
is that there is the smell of the lamp about it: it may reflect the tastes of the judges and dons who advance it, rather than the real preferences of the commonality of mortals." Robert McCloskey, "Economic Due Process and the Supreme Court: An Exhumation and Reburial," Supreme Court Review (1962): 34, 46.
Leprosy, domesticity, and patient protest: the social context of a patients' rights movement in mid-century America
The new parson takes his place and proceeds to read the morning prayer in a loud, clear voice without the aid of altar, pulpit, or prayer desk; he launches into his sermon, which, no doubt, had the length and smell of the lamp expected by eighteenth-century church-goers.
Fredericton's parson Cooke