ticktock

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 10:59 PM, George Thompson
<george.thompson at nyu.edu> wrote:
>
>
> New York Times, February 19, 2009, section A, p. 21, profile of Lawrence Summers:
>
> As to whether he backed Mr. Geithner's decision to introduce the bank bailout plan before
> arriving at specifics, Mr. Summers, well schooled in Washington's ways, invoked newspaper
> slang for behind-the-scenes tales.
>
> "I just don't do ticktock," he said flatly.
>
> This sense is not in the OED nor in the 2005 edition of the Cassell Slang Dictionary.

Cites back to 1973 in my post here:

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0506A&L=ADS-L&P=R458

As Grant Barrett noted offlist, the Summers quote is a bit different,
since "ticktock" appears as a mass noun. I wonder if he actually said
"I just don't do ticktocks" and was misquoted?


--Ben Zimmer

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