All steak, no sizzle.

[Jonathan Lighter]

You'd think this would be quite a bit better than the reverse - substance being more important than glitz - but from what TV news tells me, when people say it about Obama they mean it in a bad way.
 
About what I'd expect from today's glitz-crazed society, sprinting as it is toward doom and destruction.
 
But enough editorializing.  
 
1990 Allan R. Cohen & David R. Bradford _Influence Without Authority_ (N.Y.: Wiley) 233: It is possible to go a long way when you have the data on your side. On the whole, that strategy, though incomplete, is a lot better than trying to be influential through the use of interpersonal techniques when you are demonstrably wrong....The first is all steak and no sizzle; the second, all sizzle and no steak. As this case makes clear, attention only to getting it right is not enough.
 
As anyone with access to either _The Yale Book of Quotations_ or the less consistently enjoyable Gogle Books knows, it was ad legend Elmer Wheeler who coined the phrase "Don't Sell the Steak - _Sell the Sizzle!_" way back in 1937, when it was just cynical good sense to realize that John Q. Public and his lovely bride Jane Q. were suckers for sizzle over substance.
 
Nowadays, though, opinion-makers share the folk wisdom that sizzle - glitz - oomph - *and* pow are what really count in the fast-paced, infobahn, truthy world of this minute *and* tomorrow!  Which is why Lincoln isn't even *running* for dog-catcher this year!
 
So sizzle on, dudes and dudettes!  Hell beckons!
 
JL
 
 




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