![\"nyt\"](\"https:\/\/www.edder.org\/images\/nyt.gif\")
\nBy William Safire<\/p>\n
\nBy William Safire<\/p>\n
Early last month, the Los Angeles Daily News columnist Bridget Johnson noted that \u00absome recent Hollywood bits that have raised conservative ire include hailing Alfred Kinsey, Nicole Kidman sharing her bathtub with a boy in ‘Birth,’ euthanasia glorified in ‘Million Dollar Baby’ and ‘The Sea Inside.’ Regardless of politics, many agree that the ick factor<\/em> drives away moviegoers who are looking for something familiar and inspirational on-screen.\u00bb BLAME-GAME FINGER-POINTING By William Safire Early last month, the Los Angeles Daily News columnist Bridget Johnson noted that \u00absome recent Hollywood bits that have raised conservative ire include hailing Alfred Kinsey, Nicole Kidman sharing her bathtub with a boy in ‘Birth,’ euthanasia glorified in ‘Million Dollar Baby’ and ‘The Sea Inside.’ Regardless of politics, many agree that the ick factor drives away moviegoers who are looking for something familiar and inspirational on-screen.\u00bb A few weeks later, Tara Parker-Pope reported in The Wall Street Journal that a home-screening test for colon cancer is making a comeback. \u00abConvincing consumers to use the tests may be tough, however,\u00bb she wrote. \u00abThere’s the ick factor of fecal tests, which typically require patients to smear stool on a card that is then sent to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":82,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sin-categorizar"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kHv-e","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":118,"url":"https:\/\/www.edder.org\/?p=118","url_meta":{"origin":14,"position":0},"title":"El cliente","author":"Eder","date":"viernes, 16 Nov, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"El cliente, lejos de tener siempre la raz\u00f3n, como dec\u00eda el t\u00f3pico \u2013si verdadero o falso no importa ahora: el caso es que el t\u00f3pico elevaba al cliente a la categor\u00eda de sujeto decisivo de toda transacci\u00f3n\u2013, es en el panorama de las nuevas relaciones comerciales un factor despreciable de\u2026","rel":"","context":"En \u00abNA\u00bb","block_context":{"text":"NA","link":"https:\/\/www.edder.org\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2940,"url":"https:\/\/www.edder.org\/?p=2940","url_meta":{"origin":14,"position":1},"title":"Dulac, au-del\u00e0 de Dada","author":"Eder","date":"lunes, 25 Feb, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"","rel":"","context":"En \u00abCine\u00bb","block_context":{"text":"Cine","link":"https:\/\/www.edder.org\/?cat=79"},"img":{"alt_text":"La coquille et le clergyman","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.sensesofcinema.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/images\/23\/coquille.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edder.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edder.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edder.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edder.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/82"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edder.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.edder.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edder.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edder.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edder.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nA few weeks later, Tara Parker-Pope reported in The Wall Street Journal that a home-screening test for colon cancer is making a comeback. \u00abConvincing consumers to use the tests may be tough, however,\u00bb she wrote. \u00abThere’s the ick factor<\/em> of fecal tests, which typically require patients to smear stool on a card that is then sent to a lab.\u00bb
\nThe colloquial noun and interjection ick<\/em>, as well as its adjectival form, icky, are terms of disgust, distaste and revulsion. A character in Henry Cyril McNeile’s 1920 novel, \u00abBulldog Drummond,\u00bb asked: \u00abCan it be that my little pet is feeling icky-boo<\/em>? Face going green – slight perspiration – collar tight.\u00bb This suggests that ick may be derived from sick. An alternative imitative etymology is from sticky, sickeningly sweet: \u00abThey blow ickylickysticky yumyum kisses,\u00bb wrote James Joyce in his 1922 \u00abUlysses\u00bb; icky<\/em> was picked up by some jazz musicians in the 30’s to deride the overly sweet, sentimental type of jazz. Today, ick<\/em>! is an interjection of disgusted rejection, and the ick factor<\/em> is the problem caused by consumer distaste.
\nOn, if you can take it, to the interjection yuck<\/em>. In early 60’s theatrical slang, it imitated the sound of laughter, and comedians would \u00abyuck it up\u00bb to induce yuck-yucking in the audience. Within a decade, its meaning underwent an extreme makeover, perhaps having to do with certain stomach-turning jokes, and yuck turned into an expression of nose-wrinkling disapprobation. Seventeen years ago in this space, I wrote that \u00abbeginning in 1970, the word took the adjective form yucky<\/em> and gained the sense of ‘nasty, sloppy.’. . .It seems to have triumphed over the similar icky, has resisted replacement by gross and its derivative grody, but is now being challenged by a variant form, the interjection yecch and its adjectival yecchy. I predict yucky will persevere.\u00bb
\nI was too quick to cast out ick. Though usage of yucky<\/em> is fading, yecch! <\/em>– with its back-of-the-tongue concluding sound – turned out to have legs in expressing revulsion, while the interjection or exclamation ick! is showing real staying power, especially in its mock-serious combination with factor.
\n\u00abI see this as a case of embodied cognition,\u00bb says David McNeill, emeritus professor of psychology and linguistics at the University of Chicago. \u00abThe words are not just words on a page or in the air, but patterns of action.\u00bb Reviewing my list of ickisms – yuck, yecch, bleah, ew and ick – the linguist observes, \u00abNegative words having to do with disgust seem to be embodied in the experience of expelling unwanted, possibly poisonous, materials from the mouth. All the sounds you cite are made by closing the back of the mouth (keeping the stuff from entering the food canal) and\/or opening the front (expelling it).\u00bb
\nCan these imitative sounds be considered words? \u00abThese are words that refer to the sounds we make,\u00bb says Paul Ekman, an expert in facial expressions and a professor of psychology at the University of California at San Francisco. \u00abThey are linguistic representations, resembling the sounds we make when we’re disgusted. The face we make with yuck and ick is an expression that refers to the spontaneous act of disgust.\u00bb
\nEnd of imitative ick-factoring. You can now wipe that awful expression off your face.<\/p>\n
\nPresident Bush’s press secretary, Scott McClellan, replied to repeated questions about laxity in the early response to Katrina devastation with two classic counterattacking phrases: \u00abIf you want to continue to engage in finger-pointing and blame-gaming, that’s fine.\u00bb
\nThis triggered a counter-counterattack from liberal columnists. \u00abMcClellan must have been unaware,\u00bb wrote E.J. Dionne Jr. in The Washington Post, \u00abthat the White House had been organizing a finger-pointing, blame-gaming project of its own\u00bb – working, as The New York Times put it, \u00abto shift the blame away from the White House and toward officials of New Orleans and Louisiana who, as it happens, are Democrats.\u00bb The key word in attacking the counterattack phrases is accountability.
\nThirteen years before, after a riot burned out sections of Los Angeles, a group of protesters held up a sign reading, \u00abIf You Won’t Help Us, Clinton Will.\u00bb The elder President Bush’s response was, \u00abThis is no time to play the blame game.\u00bb
\nThe pointed finger, now a symbol of unfair accusation, began its metaphoric rise in 1829 as the finger of scorn: \u00abIt was a shame,\u00bb wrote Pierce Egan in his British fisticuffs serial, \u00abBoxiana,\u00bb \u00abthat pure and honorable men should be suspected of such doings. . .for even at him the finger of scorn had been pointed.\u00bb Then as now, the phrase was an attack on those making charges.
\nThe rhyming blame game has now surpassed the scornful finger, even in this digital age. Who started it? The British critic Kenneth Tynan in 1958 described \u00abthe worst of domestic rituals, the Blame Game. I blame my agony on you; you blame yours on her; she blames hers on me.\u00bb
\nPerhaps the phrase first appeared in a letter to a columnist named Geraldine in the Nov. 27, 1937, Oakland Tribune, as New Deal controversy grew: \u00abThe educated call the rest of the world moron. . .while the workers claim the work is too hard and the idle say it’s not enough.\u00bb Memorably, the anonymous writer concluded, \u00abLet’s beat the ‘blame’ game by thinking deeply, talking sensibly and blaming sparsely.\u00bb<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"