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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.
Get me out of here.
Dear Word Detective: I came across this expression while reading Treasure Island, and I thought I’d try asking you about it, even though it’s probably old-fashioned. It’s used in Chapters 6 and 8. Page references below are in the Oxford Classics edition. “I’ll go with you [in search of treasure]; and, I’ll go bail for it, so will Jim, and be a credit to the undertaking” (34). “…I would have gone bail for the innocence of Long John Silver” (45). I think it means something like “to risk oneself in an undertaking,” “vouch for,” or “stand security for,” but the two uses in the story are different from each other. I’m curious where the expression originated, and what the meaning of “bail” is here. Is it related to the legal use of the term (i.e., paying bail for someone’s release from custody), or perhaps to the action of bailing water out of a boat (though I can’t see the connection right now). — Steve.
“Bail” is quite a word. We “bail” our friends out of jail, the government “bails out” the airlines and automakers every few years, people “bail out” of airplanes or bad relationships, and we “bail” the water out of a leaky boat as fast as we can. As a noun, “bail” also means a cross-bar, especially the one forming the top of a wicket in the game of cricket, as well as being an archaic term for the wall of a fortress or the like. Several of these senses are definitely related, and some authorities believe they all are.
The root underlying several senses of “bail” is the Latin “bajulare,” meaning “to carry” or “to bear a burden,” which begat the French “baillier,” meaning “to take charge of” or “hand over or deliver.” This “take charge of” sense produced the most common sense of “bail,” that of “release of a person who would otherwise be in jail” either upon payment of a security deposit (also known as “bail”) or into the charge of one who swears to ensure the accused’s appearance at trial. This use of “to bail” meaning “to vouch for” or “to guarantee” produced, in the 16th century, the senses in the passages you cite, both of which amount to a solemn commitment to see the task through.
The “bailing” one does on a sinking boat comes directly from the French “baille,” meaning “bucket,” but that word may hark back to the “carry” sense of the Latin “bajulare” as well. “Bailing out” of an aircraft probably echoes the sense of bailing water from a boat (although in the UK it is often spelled “bale,” as if a bundle of something were being jettisoned).
Wild thing.
Dear Word Detective: I am trying to find out the origin of the word “gnu.” It is an alternate name for the wildebeest, a large African antelope. — Jason.
That thing is an antelope? Looks to me like a buffalo that’s been through the rinse cycle once too often. But your email address indicates that you’re writing from Zambia, so I’ll take your word for it.
OK, a “gnu” is indeed an antelope, but it sounds like one put together by a committee. According to the Columbia Encyclopedia, the gnu’s “heavy head and humped shoulders resemble those of a buffalo, while the compact hindquarters are like those of a horse. The gnu has a beard, a short, erect mane, and a long, flowing tail.” Well, I suppose something had to balance out the butterflies.
Onward. As you note, the gnu is otherwise known as the “wildebeest,” which is Dutch for “wild animal,” the Dutch having been a powerful colonial presence in Southern Africa at one point.
“Gnu” itself is the word for the animal in the language of the Khoikhoi ethnic group of southwestern Africa. Early European settlers called these folks “Hottentots,” a name, now considered offensive, which in the settlers’ Dutch dialect meant “stutterer,” a reference to the Khoikhoi use of “clicks” as consonants. The word “gnu” is presumed to be echoic in origin, an imitation of the snorting grunt of the animal itself.
Although in Khoikhoi the “g” of “gnu” is pronounced (”g-noo”), in English it is generally not and the word is pronounced simply “noo.” One notable exception, which has been running through my head since I started answering this question, is the immortal song “The Gnu” by the British comedy team of Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, who made a point of stressing the “g” right over the edge: “I’m a G-nu, I’m a G-nu, The g-nicest work of g-nature in the zoo; I’m a G-nu, How do you do, You really ought to k-now w-ho’s w-ho’s; I’m a G-nu, Spelt G-N-U, I’m g-not a Camel or a Kangaroo; So let me introduce, I’m g-neither man nor moose, Oh g-no g-no g-no, I’m a G-nu.”
p.s. — There is also a free, open-source computer operating system called GNU, commonly encountered as part of the GNU/Linux operating system.
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