Not a monkey's butt
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I've been struck for some time by the amazingly loose way the press uses the verb compare. You must have noticed the sort of thing I mean. Politician A reacts to some harsh policy or aggressive act advocated by politician B and says something like "Even Hitler didn't go that far", and the headlines say "A COMPARES B TO HITLER." I've seen dozens of examples of this (if you want to see a concrete example, take a look at this story about Hank Williams Jr. allegedly comparing Barack Obama with Hitler, something he clearly did not do). I thought it might be worth mentioning on Language Log at some point. But I have never seen such an outrageously careless instance as Evan McMorris-Santoro's claim on TPM that:
Obama senior strategist David Axelrod compared the former House Speaker [Newt Gingrich] to the ass end of a monkey.
Axelrod absolutely did no such thing (as Victor Steinbok pointed out in an email to the American Dialect Society's list). Asked about Gingrich's rising prominence (40% of Republicans now support him for president), Axelrod said this:
Just remember the higher a monkey climbs on a pole, the more you can see his butt. So, you know, the Speaker is very high on the pole right now and we’ll see how people like the view.
This isn't comparing Gingrich with a monkey's rear end!
It's a picturesque way of warning that as your prominence increases, more and more aspects of you that perhaps you wouldn't have wanted to display will be exposed to public scrutiny. Now that Gingrich is the front runner, the press attention will turn to (no pun intended) his down side.
Axelrod wasn't comparing anyone to a monkey's asshole; he spoke in parables, but he appeared to mean that Newt is a rich ethics violator who's done many nasty things, and a member in good standing of the assholocracy, and the press will soon be all over him like a pack of hounds. That's totally different.
[Comments are closed because I know you would not be able to resist giving your opinions about Mr. Gingrich. Notice that I have given no such opinion: This is Language Log, not Republican Primary Log. I have merely tried to do a better job of interpreting Mr. Axelrod than Evan McMorris-Santoro did.]