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30 June 2010 is 22,000. Volume 264 No. 8862 ISSN: 0039 8837
THE LANGUAGE GAME
Makers of the news JOHN MORRISH
ACCORDING TO The Independent, “The next big challenge for Downing Street’s chief spin doctor could be to protect his own rep- utation.” Technically, Andy Coulson, the former editor of the News of the World and the man at the centre of the renewed phone- hacking furore, is Downing Street’s director of communications. But he is often charac- terised as a “spin doctor”. A “spin doctor” is someone who works behind the scenes to ensure that personali- ties, policies and events are given the best possible interpretation in the media. The “spin doctor” is an expert in using “spin”, which is a bias or slant that sits on top of the bare facts. The noun “spin” comes from the verb, which is first recorded in the eighth century to draw out and twist the fibres to make it into a con- tinuous thread. It is a Germanic word. The product of spinning is “yarn”, another word recorded first in Anglo-Saxon times. Journalists sometimes refer to a story as “a yarn”, which comes from “spinning a yarn”. An analogy to the process of stretching out material, it means to tell a story, particularly of the lengthy and/or unbelievable sort. The Oxford English Dictionary says it is nautical slang, but its first citation, from 1812, is from James Hardy Vaux’s New and Comprehensive Vocabulary of the Flash Language. Vaux was a pickpocket transported to Australia, who compiled his dictionary of underworld slang during his “solitary hours of cessation from hard labour”. He wrote that “yarning or spin- ning a yarn is a favourite amusement among flash people [criminals]: signifying to relate their various adventures”. I don’t think that’s the primary source of our modern “spin”, however. As a trainee jour- nalist in the early 1980s, I remember reporters being encouraged to put “a bit of spin” or “top-
spin” on a story to make it more interesting. The analogy was from ball games. A ball with “spin” may be more effective than one with- out. But which game? We assumed it was cricket, where the word has been applied since the 1850s to a twisting motion given to the ball. But the evidence is that the idiom came from the United States, where “spin” is an essential part of baseball. The OED’s first cita- tion is from a Guardian Weekly report from America in 1978, in which it was stated that “The CIA can be an excellent source, though, like every other, its offerings must be weighed for factuality and spin”. The Washington Post a year later talked about a Government spokesman putting “a negative spin” on events. The expression was still unfamiliar enough here in 1989 for The Independent to put it inside inverted commas and identify its source: “In the American political vernacular, he is try- ing to put a ‘spin’ on the Bush triumph.” As for “spin doctor”, that is recorded first
in The New York Times of October 1984 in exactly our modern sense: “They won’t be just press agents trying to impart a favourable spin to a routine release. They’ll be the Spin Doctors, senior advisers to the candidates.” William Safire, the NYT Magazine’s lan- guage columnist, examined the phrase a couple of years later and suggested it was based on a slang meaning of the verb, which he said in the 1950s meant “to deceive”. But he also made the connection with baseball. As for “doctor”, from the Latin word for
teacher, that has long meant an expert, par- ticularly one who can mend things. “Spin doctor” follows other experts, such as the “play doctor”, first recorded in 1922, and the more recent “script doctor”, both of whom use their experience to soup up dull stories: which almost takes us back where we started.
Glimpses of Eden
THE SWALLOWS gath- ered on the wire near the Headingley cricket ground lifted at the burst of euphoric shouting which
suddenly pulsed out from the arena. Pakistan had scored their first boundary against England. The swallows were getting ready to depart these shores, and they aren’t the only ones: the Pakistan team too will be returning after their summer tour of England. But what will they find on their homecoming? The recent flood- ing is a disaster not only for humans but for birds, too. The Indus River is one of the world’s most important avian migratory routes, along whose course over a million birds find their way from the wildlife riches of east Siberia
48 | THE TABLET | 18 September 2010
through Tibet into Pakistan. Just like the home- coming cricketers, the birds returning along this course, known as the Indus Flyway, will find a very different world from the one they left. How will they steer with landmarks sub- merged, how will they feed with their insect-rich villages turned into lakes? As we left Headingley, spirits lifted by a fine sporting encounter and the friendly banter of a good- natured, racially mixed crowd, the phone wires were empty. Our swallows had gone. I prayed that the swallows returning along the Indus Flyway will bring to the villagers trying to rebuild their lives in Pakistan what they always bring to us: the hope and faith needed to carry on.
Jonathan Tulloch
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