Shadow Government

[Lynne Murphy]

--On Monday, March 4, 2002 8:32 am -0800 Dave Wilton <dave at WILTON.NET>
wrote:

> Since 1990 the District of Columbia has been electing "Shadow Senators,"
> using the term in the UK sense. Presumably if DC ever gets statehood, the
> shadow senators would become real ones.

I'm not sure I'd call this the 'UK sense' of _shadow_.  In this case, no
one has to be deposed in order for the shadow senators to be real senators.

Incidentally, it looks like this sense of 'shadow government' was used of
similar happenings in Iraq earlier:

http://217.158.86.13/ip/data/ipenglish/215.htm

So, we've got three uses of 'shadow' going:

-in 'shadow government' it's the same standing govt, but in reduced form
-in 'shadow cabinet' it's a non-standing but active (as opposition)
-in 'shadow senator' it's not-active and not-standing

Only in the last case does anyone actually get elected for their positions.
The three uses have in common that it's someone/some organization who's
self-designated to run (or work in) a government if ever given the chance.
(If we understand 'self-designation' to mean designation by the interested
parties: the standing govt, the Tory party, the District of Columbia,
respectively.)  What's different among the three uses is their status when
they're not governing.  So, we might say that there is one sense of
'shadow' here, if we consider the basic sense to be the common bit that I
wrote above.

Interesting that major dictionaries don't have this (or the phrases it's
in).

Lynne



Dr M Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
Acting Director, MA in Applied Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

phone +44-(0)1273-678844
fax   +44-(0)1273-671320