William Safire "Under the Bus"

[Bapopik at AOL.COM]

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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