nodding acquaintance

plural nodding acquaintances

1. idiomaticusuallyA casual or partial familiarity; a relationship which is not close or fully developed; an inexact understanding (of something).

   None of the quarrymen were intimate friends of mine. I had a nodding acquaintance with them.

   1857, Wilkie Collins, chapter 5, in The Queen of Hearts

   3 more examples

   There isn't any doubt but that he had a nodding acquaintance with every pretty girl in town.

   1910, Louis Joseph Vance, chapter 10, in The Fortune Hunter

   [A] Northwestern University psychologist reported, for what it was worth, a surprising finding: an average college-educated modern man has at least a nodding acquaintance with four times as many words as Shakespeare used.

   1940 April 22, “Education: Better than Shakespeare?”, in Time

   A government with even a nodding acquaintance with competence and good sense would have launched an all-out war against Al Qaeda, not Iraq, in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11.

   2004 July 12, Bob Herbert, “Opinion: The Real Enemy Staring Us in the Face”, in New York Times, retrieved 08 May 2013

2. idiomaticSomeone who is a remote or passing acquaintance.

   [S]he knows only two of them as nodding acquaintances, and has never spoken to them privately.

   2011 May 21, “Race-rigging scandal: We'll clear our names”, in Daily Mirror, UK, retrieved 09 May 2013

   2 more examples

   [T]o reach Cattewater I must either fetch a circuit through purlieus where every householder knew me and every urchin was a nodding acquaintance, or make a straight dash.

   1903, Arthur Quiller-Couch, chapter 8, in The Adventures of Harry Revel

   He could not treat this scandalous matter in his own office. . . . Who was there he could go to? Linkman and Laver in Budge Row, perhaps—reliable, not too conspicuous, only nodding acquaintances.

   1922, John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga, part 3, ch. 5