| shanghai: To use trickery to put someone in an undesirable position. To put aboard a ship by force,often with the help of liquor or a drug. In the 19th-century days of the China trade, ship captains sometimes obtained the additional hands they needed by drugging men on shore, carrying them aboard ship, and sailing before they regained consciousness. Contrary to common belief, the origin of the term may have had little to do with unsavory doings in the great Chinese seaport of Shanghai. Instead, Brewer's dictionary of Phrase and Fable suggests it stems from the phrase "ship him to Shanghai", meaning to send someone on a long voyage, often to the Orient. silent spring: An ecological disaster; the death of nature from the unrestricted use of toxic chemicals. It refers to a spring without songbirds, caused by use of toxic chemicals that poison the food chain and destroy the balance of nature. It was the title of the 1962 book by Rachel Carson (1907-1964) that raised an early alarm about the environmental effects of herbicides and pesticides; the book helped launch the environmental movement. The term also applies, as illustrated in the following quotation, to groundbreaking books which have the same effect on public opinion as Carson's book. Usage: "Rotello's ambitious book is the Silent Spring of the AIDS epidemic". (Frederic M.Biddle, in the Boston Globe, July 23,1997, commenting on Gabriel Rotello's book Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men.) smoking gun: Incontrovertible evidence of guilt, often used in a political context. The reference is to a device in detective fiction, in which a character is found standing over a corpse, holding a smoking gun. This is assumed to show guilt, although in fiction the detective hero often is able to demonstrate that the obvious conclusion is wrong and that some other malefactor committed the crime. The expression is a legacy of the Watergate scandal. As evidence of crimes accumulated, defenders of President Richard Nixon contended that while there was ample evidence of impropriety, there was no direct evidence that he had committed a crime. This abruptly changed with the discovery of a taped conversation between Nixon and chief of staff, HR Haldeman on June 24,1972, in which there was agreement that the CIA should be used to block the FBI investigation of the Watergate break-in, which had occured the week before. This evidence was proclaimed to be the "smoking gun" demonstrating Nixon's participation in efforts to obstruct the investigation. snake oil: Various mixtures sold as medicine usually without regard to their medical worth. A quack remedy. Now the term is applied to phony nostrums in all fields, and to poppycock in general. Anyone who purveys these dubious cures is a snake-oil salesman, a con artist. ~Merriam Webster's Dictionary of Allusions. |
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