"treat them mean, keep them keen" meaning in English

See treat them mean, keep them keen in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Proverb

Head templates: {{head|en|proverb|head=}} treat them mean, keep them keen, {{en-proverb}} treat them mean, keep them keen
  1. (informal) A woman will be more interested in a man if he is not kind to her. Tags: informal Synonyms: treat 'em mean, keep 'em keen, treat 'em mean to keep 'em keen Related terms: be cruel to be kind

Download JSON data for treat them mean, keep them keen meaning in English (1.5kB)

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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-04-24 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (82c8ff9 and f4967a5). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.