Cross at the green, not in betw…
Dear Word Detective: What is the origin of the phrase “to throw one under the bus”? — Brenda Varney.
Good question, and, it would seem, a timely one as well. It’s hard to pick up a newspaper or turn on the TV these days without hearing of someone being “thrown under the bus.” Last year CNN’s Jack Cafferty declared that “Rather than face Senate confirmation hearings over his reappointment as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Bush White House has decided to simply throw General Peter Pace under the bus.” Elsewhere, the E-Commerce News warned that a new song royalty scheme would “… throw large webcasters under the bus and put an end to small webcasters’ hopes of one day becoming big.” And a letter to the New York Times cautioned the paper not to “throw doctors under the bus … as the cause of health care costs.”
“To throw someone under the bus” is defined as meaning “to sacrifice; to treat as a scapegoat; to betray,” but I think the key to the phrase really lies in the element of utter betrayal, the sudden, brutal sacrifice of a stalwart and loyal teammate for a temporary and often minor advantage. There is no retirement dinner, no gold watch, for poor schmuck “thrown under the bus.” On the contrary, the scapegoat’s name is liable to disappear from the website overnight.
The earliest solid example of “throw under the bus” found in print so far is from 1991, although a 1984 quote from rock star Cyndi Lauper where she uses the phrase “under the bus” (without “throw”) may or may not count as a sighting. Incidentally, by far the best compilation of citations for the phrase can be found, as usual, at Grant Barrett’s Double-Tongued Dictionary website (www.doubletongued.org).
The exact origin of “thrown under the bus” is, unfortunately, a mystery. Slang expert Paul Dickson, quoted by William Safire in his New York Times magazine column, traces it to sports, specifically the standard announcement by managers trying to get the players to board the team bus: “Bus leaving. Be on it or under it.” The phrase does seem to be popular in sports circles, but few of the citations I have seen from sports publications carry the same overtones of casual, callous betrayal that one finds in non-sporting uses.
Consequently, I have my own theory. I don’t think the “bus” was ever the team bus. As someone who spent a lot of time standing on Manhattan street corners and narrowly avoided being expunged by speeding city buses on several occasions, to me the phrase conjures up the classic urban nightmare of being pushed in front of a bus. As a way to quickly and irreversibly get rid of someone, “throwing” them under a bus in this sense would be the ideal solution and would satisfy the connotations of sudden, cold brutality the phrase usually carries. So I suspect that the phrase has urban origins, and migrated into sports world via players from big cities.
My theory is related, but more abstract: The bus is an overbearing crisis, and throwing someone under it would cause it to crash, or at least slow down enough to escape it. Hence, Libby was thrown under the bus of the Plame scandal, which then came to a screeching halt.
The phrase bears a strong resemblance to the expression “throw someone to the wolves” which connotes sacrificing a member of one’s own group to a predator in an act of self(ish) defense.
Throwing someone under the bus could help the vehicle gain traction in a slippery situation. This picture agrees well with the definition of someone being sacrificed.
Somewhat like chaifilius’s explanation, my interpretation, culled from contexts of usage I’ve heard, is essentially that one suddenly sees the bus about to hit one oneself; so one quickly reaches for and grabs someone else, nearby, and throws him instead under the bus. I don’t mean that this is the origin of the phrase so much as I mean that this is my view of its present meaning.
I agree with your opinion of the origin of this saying. I thought it might be related to an incident in Seattle (I was there moments after it happened), where a girl was “thrown under the bus” by her boyfriend/ex-boyfriend. Actually, she was pushed out the door and ended up under it.
I think the notion of “team bus” is significant in that the person being thrown under the bus is invariably close to the people doing the throwing. The scape goat has to be from one’s own side of the issue in order to appease critics. It is hardly possible to throw one’s opponent under the bus, given that betrayal is part and parcel of the process. Is it possible that the origin of the phrase refers to the storage compartment “under the bus” where luggage is usually stored? Probably not. That image would not seem to allow for betrayal or destruction, merely degradation. However, “throw it under the bus,” coming from common usage in a tour or team bus– once it is overheard by someone outside that milieu– could easily become transmuted to the form with which we are now familiar.
Actually, I do believe that the term actually came from the earliest days of Greyhound where drivers would save themselves embarrasment by tossing contraband under the bus, while acting like they were simply throwing luggage in the storage area.
Throwing it ‘under the bus’ was a term used for disposing of something that would get you fired if the boss was walking up.
Many times, the management of Greyhound would send spot checkers from the office out to catch drivers with whiskey flasks or illegal ‘uppers’ or pills while operating the busses.
The problem was that the spot inspectors would invariably come out from the lighted terminals, which the bus would always face directly at when first arriving.
Seeing a spot inspector coming out of the building, a fast thinking driver would jump out of the bus, lean down to open a luggage bay while tossing his contraband literally under the bus, and start tossing bags out, or in as the moment called for.
When the inspector would arrive, the driver would be searched, the bus and luggage bay would be inspected and the driver would get away clean.
So, in a way… these drivers were forced to toss and old friend (their booze or pills) literally under the bus. Which is what people sometimes do to each other in order to save their skin for the moment.
The above sound to contrived to me. My theory is a lot less direct but I think more likely. By my memory, it wasn’t uncommon to describe someone as looking like they were “hit by a bus.” I always took this as a natural coinage for a depression or WWII era urban America. An alliterative variant used in “Guys and Dolls” is “Stabbed by a Studebaker.”
I had heard and used “hit by a bus” often and it never described physical distress, but instead the shocked and frazzled look people get when under emotional strain. For example, you might say a husband looked like he was hit by a bus when he found out his wife ran off with the milkman.
It is not a big leap to go from being hit by a bus to being thrown in front of or under a bus. Of course being thrown “under” gives the image of the thrower moving forward or advancing without the throwee.
They use this term in theater in Iraq, as in publically blaming someone for something in a meeting.
The bus is mentioned in the book “From Good to Great”. I never read the book but part of the philosophy is that the first priority is not where the bus is going but who is on it. It’s been widely read. Maybe the saying has taken hold for different reasons one of which being because many people in the corporate world have a some exposure to this book and have witnessed co-workers (who might think they are CEO material) trying to stay on the bus at all costs even while throwing other co-workers even friends or former allies underneath.
I had always just assumed the idea was that needed the bus to stop so he could board it, so he shoved someone else in front of it as an expedient way to bring it to a halt. That was strictly an assumption, though; I never looked into it.
In a public agency, there are two scenarios I have seen the phrase consistently used for years. One is in reference to a consultant where the unfortunate firm or consultant project manager is sacrificed when the public servant, who is usually to blame for lack of planning or lack of knowing what they need, “throws the consultant under the bus” by deflecting blame on the consultant and thereby coating oneself with teflon. The other common scenario is within the agency’s organization itself where, at levels from the Executive Director to a Manager, to preserve one’s own image and perception of power, another is “thrown under bus” which can range from a public denouncement of another’s views or work, to a dismissal from employment due to another’s power base being threatened, or often the perception of it being threatened. By far the more common is the internal agency scenario. Ref: 30 years career public servant/executive and now 2 years consultant.
I don’t remember ever hearing the phrase. I remember using it for the first time in 1999. I worked in auto finance for a bank. I bought contracts from car dealers who had a habit of presenting false information on a customer’s form to make the customer look “better”. Things like writing down a 3 year job when it was actually a 3 month job. I told a dealer that doing that kind of thing was like a Boy Scout who was helping the old lady across the street. Half way across he throws her under the bus. In other words, the false application from the car dealer was a lure of goodwill that resulted in bad faith and a credit denial for inaccurate information. I told a dealer “don’t try to throw me under the bus on this one”. I honestly don’t remember the phrase before that although it was probably cooking in my sub conscience somewhere.