Metaphors often start out fresh but become stale, even rotten. I nominate throw under the bus as the top expression that passed its best-before date this year.
We heard it so often: Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper threw his top aide Nigel Wright under the bus during the Senate scandal. U.S. president Barack Obama threw Israel under the bus. Fired sports coaches and players were thrown under the bus. Endangered species are being thrown under the bus.
Fresh and tasty
Back in the 1980s, when some etymologists claim the expression was invented, throw under the bus was a dramatic way to describe people who had been callously, sometimes violently discarded. Business executives, bus tour employees, Cyndi Lauper, Mitt Romney and others have been credited with coining it.
Under the bus peaked in popularity during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign. For me, it started to stink in 2013.
Recently I read Malcolm Gladwell’s David and Goliath, where he cites many examples of trends with outcomes that start out positively, peak, then decline. This can be represented by an inverted U-shaped curve. Consider the person whose rising income frees her from worry but then grows into a new set of problems… harsher prison terms that morph from individual deterrents to community hatred of police… class sizes that are reduced from unmanageable hordes to cliques so small that struggling students feel like (couldn’t resist) they’ve been thrown under the boss.
Stale and rotting
Unlike Malcolm, I don’t have the research to back my theory about the benefits/unbenefits curve of this kind of jargon. But like the super-tasters he wrote about in another book, every time I hear throw under the bus, I gag. So do many of my super-writer colleagues.
Like low-hanging fruit and other good terms gone bad, perhaps under the bus simply needs to be replaced with a simple clear expression, as in callously or violently discarded. Let’s give a well-earned rest to throw under the bus, think outside the box and other tired metaphors.
Plenty of strong verbs come to mind. Here are some:
abandon
betray
blame
can
cancel
cast aside
chuck
discard
dispense with
dispose of
deep-six
desert
dispatch
drop
ditch
dump
eject
eliminate
jettison
junk
oust
reject
remove
repudiate
renounce
scrap
shake off
shed
sweep away
throw away
throw out
throw overboard
toss aside
After some respite, a new metaphor may spring to life. Or at the very least, fewer busy, lazy, copy cat or stupid people will default to this once-tasty, now-putrid term.
Better still, maybe you have a better replacement metaphor already. Please share.
