"pretzel palace"

Benjamin Barrett gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM
Tue May 15 16:28:41 UTC 2012


The earliest hits on GB I see are in 1975, both from US government institutions.

One is at http://ow.ly/aVsGI:

On the one hand, our type of organizational structure was criticized by our Governor, department of health, press, and others as a "pretzel palace" and our 1976 Medi-Cal contract was renewed on the express condition that we combine our...

1979 "Time" (http://ow.ly/aVtES) talks about economic policies:

He termed the Administration's energy and economic policies "a pretzel palace of confusion."

1991 "The Profit Motive and Patient Care: The Changing Accountability of Doctors and Hospitals" (http://ow.ly/aVsXU) talks about convoluted organizational arrangements:

The president of HMO International, one of the for-profit management companies that was associated with a prepaid plan, likened the convoluted organizational arrangements to a "pretzel palace." He said in congressional testimony that HMO International's "organizational structure [of different corporations and partnerships] is almost incomprehensible, onerous to manage, duplicative of expense, and in a word, it is wrong."

Someone else wonders what "pretzel palace" means at http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/67768/what-does-a-pretzel-palace-mean. The answers include a suggestion that brittleness has to do with it, but that doesn't seem to match the evidence.

Also, the expression "Byzantine pretzel palace" occurs twice in GB.

Benjamin Barrett
Seattle, WA

On May 15, 2012, at 7:46 AM, Dan Goncharoff wrote:

> Jerry Brown yesterday said of California's budget "It=92s a pretzel palace =
> of
> incredible complexity.=94
>
> I have never before seen the phrase used before in the context of financial
> complexity.
>
> GB shows a hit in Asia Sentinel from 2006:
>
> "Restructuring negotiations were colored by controversy over a bewildering
> corporate pretzel palace that included a shadowy series of banks in the
> Cook Islands and Cayman Islands and countless legal challenges..."
>
> It's talking about corporate structure instead of budgeting, but similar
> enough for my taste.
>
> The use of the phrase implies to me, however, that it is expected to be
> familiar to an Asian audience in 2006. Does anyone have any insight into
> the use of the phrase?

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list