[Ads-l] "You [X] 'em, we [X-rhyme] 'em"

[David Metevia]

Ted Nugent: "You can't grill it, if you don't kill it."

On Sun, Jun 4, 2017 at 8:31 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Back around 1980-81, I had a university acquaintance who would frequently
> answer with a selection from among these sayings:
>
> "City Morgue: You kill 'em, we chill 'em!"
>
> "City Morgue: You stab' em, we slab 'em!"
>
> "Abortion Clinic: You rape 'em, we scrape 'em. No fetus can beat us."
>
> Now I read in Hugh Gusterson's informative _Drone_ (Cambridge: MIT Press,
> 2016), p. 9, that,
>
> "'You Track 'Em, We Whack 'Em,' is the informal motto of the team at the
> National Security Agency that collects and analyzes ... cell phone data
> [that may serve to identify the whereabouts of prominent terrorists]."
>
> Googling "You kill 'em, we chill 'em" turns up approx. one zillion
> instances of this pattern.
>
> How far back can this black-humor genre be traced?
>
> JL
>
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

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