Here and There

I can just see Bill Safire’s New York Times Magazine column in the coming weeks discussing this one. This one being “stinging rebuke.”

It’s easily the phrase of the week. Hell, even I used it in Work Blog 1.

What the hell is a rebuke? And does it always sting, or is there a less pain-inducing version out there somewhere?

First, let’s consult Webster’s Thesaurus: “Text: an often public or formal expression of disapproval (delivered a stinging rebuke to the congress, calling for an end to backstabbing and arguing).”

My god, there’s the phrase, right there in the entry for “rebuke”!

On to Webster’s dictionary: “1. to criticize sharply. REPRIMAND: to serve as a rebuke to. 2. to turn back or keep down.”

Fine. But why isn’t anyone using reprimand? I prefer it, as it conjures images of a teacher or parent beating or yelling at a kid. The entire Bush Administration stands for the kid here, and SCOTUS as the crotchety old pedagogue. Nice.

Onto that more reliable index of popular culture and collective conscience: Google. I’ll google (lowercase as a verb, or so I unilaterally decided) the phrase “stinging rebuke” and see what Google (the proper noun, and thus capped) finds for me.

Surprisingly, our beloved SCOTUS stinging rebuke didn’t even make the first page of results. In fact, not a single stinging rebuke made it on the first page more than once.

Here we have the following SRs (I take license here, yes): a comment on Hurricane Katrina, a Fox News story about John Kerry, something about the Kenyan government, a ChronWatch story about Andy Rooney, a rebuke of Kofi Annan, a British SR of “the medical profession”, a “Stinging Rebuke to the Ultra-Centrist”, someone’s blog about a tree, and an SR of liberal blogger Bob Geiger.

I just love how when phrases like this catapult into popular vernacular, they essentially lose meaning. Anyone could read a newspaper headline and realize the Supreme Court more or less told Bush “No, you can’t do that.” And in a pedestrian metaphorical sense (given the nature of what it was Bush and Co. were trying to do), the rebuke must sting.

I don’t have a strong feeling either way on this usage. It’s apt. It’s articulate. It’s everywhere.

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