The McSheehey (Time magazine, 1944)

[Barry Popik]

Maybe McSheehy is the source of LBJ's "lift up the cow's tail and look
things squarely in the face"?...McSheehy is not in the Yale Book of
Quotations.
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 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,885499,00.html
 The McSheehy Monday, Jul. 17, 1944


Under the big gold dome of San Francisco's City Hall there were sighs and
reminiscent laughter. In the press room and in the ornate, blue and gilt
Chamber where the City's Board of Supervisors meets, they knew that
something wonderful was gone. Ruddy, jut-jawed James B. McSheehy, master of
the mangled metaphor, was dead.

In his 24 years as a city official, Supervisor McSheehy took pride in his
oratorical blockbusters. He boasted that one reporter was permanently
assigned to collect each day's most glaring and improbable McSheehyisms. A
belligerent, charming, oldfashioned, long-winded politician who loved the
sound of his own voice, McSheehy orated on & on—and was loved for his
majesty of phrasing. Students of metaphor-mixing compared him to
Philadelphia's famed ex-Councilman Charles Pommer, a slapdash stylist with a
less subtle ear ("I have always been man enough to stand on my own two
shoulders"—TIME, Nov. 20, 1939). He was also ranked with Hollywood's Samuel
Goldwyn, an executive whose high-salaried writers are often suspected of
improving on the Goldwyn quotations ("They are always biting the hand that
lays the golden egg").

At bars, at lunch tables, throughout the City Hall, San Francisco remembered
last week, laughed fondly and gratefully, quoted and requoted some of
McSheehy's best:

¶ "Let us take the bull by the tail and look the matter squarely in the
face."

¶ "Gentlemen, the sum mentioned comes within a few cents of being a vast and
fabulous sum of money."

¶ "The handwriting on the wall is just as clear as a bell."

¶ "That is all water over a wheel and now it's coming back to haunt us."

¶ "This is crouched in language which is perfectly oblivious."

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http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,894814,00.html
On Record Monday, Mar. 21, 1960



(...)

An unwritten custom for both House and Senate reporters is to clean up
little slips of grammar, fact or taste made by the solons. Once a
Congressman leaped to his feet in a farm debate, said that the time had come
to take the bull by the tail and look the situation squarely in the face. As
discreetly as possible, the Record reporter straightened things out.

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