sycophant

My Random House dictionary and the online American Heritage Dictionary (via dictionary.com) confirm that sycophant is related at its roots to fig.

My dictionary refuses to speculate, but the online one suggests a different motivation for the word than hippie1025's old teacher's explanation:

A servile self-seeker who attempts to win favor by flattering influential people.
[Latin scophanta, informer, slanderer, from Greek skophants, informer, from skon phainein, to show a fig (probably originally said of denouncers of theft or exportation of figs)  : skon, fig + phainein, to show; see bh-¹ in Indo-European Roots.]

Hers is much more striking and fantastically unbelivable, and thus I choose to believe it more :-)

Also, I discovered I'd been pronouncing this word incorrectly. Good to know.