THE DAILY BLADE: The Seven (New) Words You Can Never Say On Television
We are all at a loss for words, since the attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords at a constituent outreach event in Tucson nearly two weeks ago. Literally.
The PC (AKA “Civility”) Police apparently held a meeting and decreed that some expressions are verboten because, you know, words have consequences.
In an interview with The Post and Courier (Charleston), Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), the third-ranking Democrat in Congress, renewed his call to revive the so-called Fairness Doctrine, suggesting that free speech may be too free: “Free speech is as free speech does. You cannot yell ‘fire' in a crowded theater and call it free speech and some of what I hear, and is being called free speech, is worse than that.” In short order, CNN's John King famously apologized to viewers last night after a political pundit used the term “in the crosshairs” while analyzing the Chicago mayoral race – a phrase that used to be OK to say on CNN. And while The Washington Post’s often droll but not always original (last item) Dana Milbank sneered that “House Speaker John Boehner set a difficult target for his troops: Could they fire shots at the health-care bill for seven hours without using the word ‘kill’?” - as in “Kill the bill!” and "job-killing” – almost all of them toed the new line in the shifting sand. Even House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who “two weeks ago used the phrase ‘job-killing’ eight times in a single news conference,” as Milbank noted, “did not allow the k-word to escape his lips at Tuesday afternoon's news conference.”
Here’s a handy-dandy compendium of the new un-PC words and phrases that neurasthenic No Labels-types would like dead and buried (of course, they wouldn’t put it that way) lest they inspire violence:
| † Aim at/for | † Death knell/the death of me | † Kill/kill off/kill the goose that laid the golden egg/kill two birds with one stone |
| † Armed to the teeth | † Die away/die down/die with your boots on/die off/die out | † Knock back on one’s heels/knock for a loop/knock off/knock out |
| † At the point of the sword | † Do in/do-or-die | † Mop/wipe the floor with |
| † Back of the hand | † Draw a bead on/draw blood/draw fire | † On the ropes |
| † Battle/battle axe | † Drop/throw a bomb | † Pack a punch/wallop |
| † Beat/beat back/beat down/beat it | † Eye for an eye | † Poison pen/pill |
|
† Beat the gun/beat to the punch (both two-fers!) |
† Fight | † Pull the trigger/quick on the trigger/trigger-happy |
| † Beat your brains out/beat into your head/beat your head against the wall | † Fire away/hang fire/hold your fire/open fire/under fire | † Run the gantlet |
|
† Bite/bite the bullet (another two-fer!) |
† Firing squad | † Russian roulette |
| † Blood and guts | † Fresh/new blood | † Saber rattling |
| † Blow the lid off/blow up | † Go at it hammer and tongs | † Shoot the breeze/shoot off one’s mouth/shoot the works/shoot yourself in the foot |
| † Bomb | † Go off half-cocked | † Shot in the arm/shot in the dark |
| † Break/break off/break up | † Gun/gun for/under the gun | † Slap down/slap in the face |
|
† Bull’s-eye/hit the bull’s-eye (and another two-fer!) |
† Hand-to-hand combat | † Stab in the back/stab in the dark |
| † Bury the hatchet | † Hard-hitting | † Stick to your guns |
| † Call the shots | † Hatchet man | † Straight shooter |
| † Carrot and stick | † Have one’s hands tied |
† Strike/strike a blow (yet another two-fer!) |
| † Chop/chopping block | † Head-hunter/head-hunting | † Take aim |
| † Cloak-and-dagger | † Hit below the belt/hit between the eyes/hit on | † Take a hit |
| † Combat | † Hunt down | † Take a stab at |
| † Crosshairs | † In at the kill | † Take it on the chin |
| † Cross swords | † In one blow | † Target |
| † Cut both ways | † In the line of fire | † Throw the first punch |
| † Cut off/cut down/cut out/cut up | † Jackknife | † Throw under the bus |
| † Cut off your nose to spite your face | † Jaw-breaker | † Two-fisted |
| † Cut to pieces/cut to the bone/cut to the quick | † Keep your powder dry | † Walk the plank |
| † Dead ahead/deadbeat/dead broke/dead center/dead duck/dead on one’s feet/dead tired/dead to rights/dead to the world | † Kick around/kickback/kick in the pants/kick in the teeth/kick it/kick out | † Zero in on |
As you can see, there’s many, many more than seven words, idioms, metaphors and phrases that use violent imagery (the ‘70s were a simpler time).
For his part, Glenn Beck promised never to use “bullet points” on the air again (5:25 in this clip):
Be warned: The Stiletto, who often uses daggers as a stylistic typographical element in this blog, refuses to forswear them.
The Libel Over Blood Libel
During the brouhaha over former AK Gov. Sarah Palin’s reference to a “blood libel” in a Facebook post and accompanying video (“within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn”), college of Staten Island (CUNY) assistant professor C.W. Anderson wrote a post for the Nieman Journalism Lab that sorta defended her by pointing out that several conservatives had used the term before she did:
The first use of the phrase I uncovered came on January 9, one day after the shooting, on the website Renew America. …
The term really sprang into use, however, when conservative blogger Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) used it in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on Jan. 10. …
The surest sign that the “blood libel” meme had caught on, though, came when it started to be used in major media comment sections like those of the Washington Post. Ordinary website readers were now referencing the term.
And then came Palin. And here we are.
Anderson, who is also a lead researcher at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, didn’t research the history of the meme as thoroughly as OpinionJournal’s James Taranto, who made the case that “[m]any of the outraged haters have themselves used the term … in similar metaphorical senses, including the New York Times,” citing examples that went as far back as 1989 ( NYT book review) and were as recent as Oct. 12, 2010 (a post by Andrew Sullivan) – all of which predate Anderson’s examples.
For its part, in defending Palin’s use of the term (“Palin is well within her rights to feel persecuted”), The Washington Times raised the stakes and referred to the strenuous efforts of “liberal commentariat” to blame conservatives with “being indirectly or somehow directly responsible for the lunatic actions of [the] accused gunman” as “simply the latest round of an ongoing pogrom against conservative thinkers [lobbing] similar baseless charges of racism, sexism, bigotry, Islamophobia and inciting violence against those on the right who have presented ideas at odds with the establishment's liberal orthodoxy.”
Meanwhile, there is more than one kind of blood libel – as Rabbi Shmuley Boteach explained in a Wall Street Journal op-ed:
Despite the strong association of the term with collective Jewish guilt and concomitant slaughter, Sarah Palin has every right to use it. The expression may be used whenever an amorphous mass is collectively accused of being murderers or accessories to murder.
The abominable element of the blood libel is not that it was used to accuse Jews, but that it was used to accuse innocent Jews - their innocence, rather than their Jewishness, being the operative point. Had the Jews been guilty of any of these heinous acts, the charge would not have been a libel.
But even Boteach can’t explain Rep. Steve Cohen’s (D-TN) use of “blood libel” in a speech rant denouncing the effort to pass a bill to repeal Obamacare. Cohen, who is Jewish, hit the trifecta – Goebbels, blood libel and Holocaust – when he said this of his Republican colleagues:
The government take-over of health care? A big lie! Just like Goebbels. You say it enough - you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie and eventually, people believe it.
Like blood libel. That's the same kind of thing. The Germans said enough about the Jews and the people believed it and you had the Holocaust.
Gawker mocked Palin’s definition of blood libel (“being falsely accused of having blood on your hands,” pretty much how Rabbi Boteach defines it) in an interview with Sean Hannity (video) about the firestorm over her use of the term: “Talkative self-parody Sarah Palin … taught us all a lesson about the meaning of "blood libel." The Stiletto wonders whether Gawker will similarly take Cohen to task. She doubts it.
In Memoriam
Don Kirshner, April 17, 1934 - January 17, 2011
I had heard the same Glenn Beck bit and was just thinking that, My God! The Stiletto will be accused of inciting violence! Does that mean that we can't say that a woman in Iran is slated to be stoned for adultery because it's violent imagery?
"Hammer and tongs" is actually referring to blacksmithing. But then do the Thought Police know anything about blacksmithing? My husband had to create a logo for WWII in a library database. He used a soldier icon. It was rejected because the soldier was carrying a gun. So he instead used an icon of a tank, which was OK. (And two thumbs up! You spelled "gantlet" right. Everybody says "gauntlet" which isn't correct.)
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