ShareThisAbout two weeks ago, we asked readers to offer alternatives to the hackneyed phrase "throw (someone) under the bus."Much abused in sports and politics, the cliche means "to reject or betray (someone); to treat as a scapegoat; to put out of favor or at a disadvantage," according to the Double-Tongued Dictionary.From the submissions, we selected a winner and a first runner-up, should the winner be unable to fulfill her obligations in this no-prize-just-notoriety contest.Karen Brovey came up with the winning term about a month ago."This was the result of one of my own silly typos -- 'relationsnip,' an abrupt breakup, for whatever reason," says Brovey, 51, a professional translator from South Park, Pa.We liked her term for the swift severing of a relationship. It's broader in meaning than throwing someone under the bus and without that sense of blame or betrayal, but still useful to describe the quick curtailing of any affiliation.For example, "Brokeback Mountain" and "Get Smart" actress Anne Hathaway "relationsnipped" her now-ex-boyfriend Raffaello Follieri after he was charged with 11 counts of fraud and money laundering. He allegedly scammed wealthy people into believing he had Vatican ties, enabling him to broker the cheap purchase of church-owned land in the United States.Our first runner-up, Joan Huber, coined the phrase "flew them back on coach." And, of course, "him," "her" or some proper noun could be substituted for "them," if need be.Given the state of the airline industry and all of the air carrier takebacks -- no more free water, soda, snacks, movies or bag checks on some domestic flights now -- this seemed an especially apt way to express someone's falling out of favor."If you liked somebody, but then if you didn't like them much anymore, 'sending them back on coach' might get the message across," said Huber, 62, of Moon, Pa. "Coach wasn't great before, but now it's really the pits."Huber, a coach flier herself, joked that the people in first class always look at coach passengers passing through with contempt and pity.Last week, it's likely presumptive presidential nominees Barack Obama and John McCain both would have liked to have flown a couple of their supporters -- namely, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm -- back on coach for remarks they respectively, though not respectfully, made about genital snipping and whining Americans imagining a recession.Two readers didn't offer replacement phrases, but they shared their own frustration with other overused words.John Remy, a former radio news reporter and anchor now in public relations, would like to 86 the oh-so-unoriginal, "win-win.""Let's face it, it really never is a 'win-win' for everyone. Someone gets more than the other," says Remy, 54, of Grove City, Pa. "It's sort of a way of pacifying people in hopes they will believe they weren't left behind."Dawn Richardson-Frank is simply sick and tired of "proactive.""How can someone act before acting? It's absurd," says Richardson-Frank, 39, of North Versailles, Pa. "We must throw the word 'proactive' under the bus."She believes the term started out as corporate gobbledygook but somehow seeped into the general lexicon."I've decided to blame Dr. Phil," she says.(L.A. Johnson can be reached at ljohnson(at)post-gazette.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Cliche conquest: Beating 'under the bus'
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