Skin In The Gane

[Benjamin Zimmer]

Safire investigated "skin in the game" in an On Language column last year:

http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F40C12FE3E550C748DDDA00894DE404482

--Ben Zimmer


On 4/15/07, Doug Harris <cats22 at frontiernet.net> wrote:
>
> From today's LA Times, in an article re the shrinking number of people
> paying US income tax:
>
> "Many people would think if you are a citizen, you ought to have skin in the
> game, and we have more and more people with no skin in the game," said Scott
> Hodge, president of the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan, conservative-leaning
> research group. "From a social perspective, we ought to be concerned about
> that."
>
> I am not really interested in sports, and I make no attempt to keep current
> on sports terms or clichés. But I have noticed with some alarm (!) a
> creeping increase, over the past couple of decades, in the number of sports
> terms, FAR too often unexplained, or self-evident, sneaking into 'general
> speak' -- the way most of us speak most of the time. 'Hat trick,' a term
> borrowed by hockey from soccer (where it actually _has_ a meaning), is a
> good example. 'Skin in the game' could be another.
> I certainly hope not. Hat trick sounds like something fun. Skin in the game
> smacks of violence, to one's own body or someone else's. Perhaps sports
> speak inventors' creed should, like doctors, include the concept 'do no
> harm'.
> (the other) doug
>
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>

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