William Safire "Under the Bus"
Bapopik at AOL.COM
Bapopik at AOL.COM
Sun Nov 19 02:53:42 UTC 2006
For those "under the bus" fans, see William Safire's Sunday NYT column. No
mention of ADS and our recent thread.
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_http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/dictionary/throw_someone_under_the_bus
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(http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/dictionary/throw_someone_under_the_bus/)
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_http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/magazine/19wwln_safire.html_
(http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/magazine/19wwln_safire.html)
Under the Bus
You must never throw the baby out with the bath water, but you may —
metaphorically — throw some scapegoat in politics or business under the bus.
Representative Mike Thompson, Democrat of California, said of the Foley
affair that broke the comeback momentum of the party in power: “The Republican
leadership is already throwing bodies under the bus, so I suspect it gets worse
as they go.”
After _Ned Lamont_
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/ned_lamont/index.html?inline=nyt-per) defeated Senator _Joseph Lieberman_
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/joseph_i_lieberm
an/index.html?inline=nyt-per) in the Connecticut Democratic primary, The
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review hooted “_Hillary Clinton_ (http://topics.nytimes.com
/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/hillary_rodham_clinton/index.html?inline=nyt-
per) went out of her way to be the first to raise the
throw-Lieberman-under-the-bus banner.” In the general election campaign, Republican candidate Alan
Schlesinger declared he had been “thrown under the bus” by the media.
David Whitley of The Orlando Sentinel threw his column in the way of the
onrushing trope. In Whitley’s collection of quotations, Philadelphia Eagles
quarterback _Donovan McNabb_
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/donovan_mcnabb/index.html?inline=nyt-per) : “Don’t try to throw
names or guys under the bus.” _Nascar_
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_association_of_stock_car_auto_racing/index.
html?inline=nyt-org) driver Casey Mears: “I don’t want to throw anybody
under the bus.” Out of sports and into celebriculture: “Getting flattened has
almost become a status symbol,” Whitley notes. “Nick Carter had a fling with
Ashlee Simpson to make Paris Hilton jealous, and apologized for it by saying
he never meant ‘to throw her under the bus.’ ”
The meaning of this distinctive American verbal phrase goes beyond “reject”
or “dissociate from” to a more vividly figurative expression of “to damage a
reputation; to use as a scapegoat.” For its origin, I turn to our leading
popular slanguist, Paul Dickson, author of “Slang —the Topical Dictionary of
Americanisms,” just deliciously updated. Origin?
He says he believes it to be back-formed from a baseball team’s clubhouse
man, who called for the ballplayers to board the team bus with “Bus leaving. Be
on it or under it.” The slanguicographer backs this up with a citation from a
1980 Washington Post article and offers another usage that extends beyond
sports: the rocker Cyndi Lauper in 1984 was quoted as saying: “In the rock ’n’
roll business you are either on the bus or under it. Playing ‘Feelings’
with Eddie and the Condos in a buffet bar in Butte is under the bus.”
>From this, Dickson deduces that the vehicle used to punish the miscreant or
scapegoat is a team or tour bus. That is a legitimate supposition about the
source of a mock-disaster metaphor. Now all we need is hard evidence from the
searchosphere about the shuddering origin of “Social Security is the third
rail of American politics.”
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