January 11th, 2010
The buck stops here, or there…whatever
The Bizarreville International Cliche Association has voted “The Buck Stops Here” as the winner of the most ambiguous, wimpified cliche of 2010. Association Chairman Max Mumpf admitted that the President’s applying the cliche recently to the Christmas Underwear Bomber followup fiasco was the clincher. The “Wimpy” trophy will be awarded at a special Rose Garden ceremony next week.
Last year’s winning cliche, as most will recall, was “Give it 110 percent”. This cliche was hailed for the beauty in its ambiguity…concerning what numerical value constituted Full Effort by an employee. It was beautiful to watch the judges debating, some thinking 110 percent was more than full effort, while some thought it was less than full effort. It was also given a Special Award as the most de-motivating little phrase of the past 100 years.
The Buck Stops Here is a famous cliche that goes back to the Truman administration, where it was used to denote that passing the buck (or blame for a bad decision) would end with Truman. During those times, however, its context would have much too tough-minded, not nearly wet & wimpy enough to be a finalist for the Cliche Assn award. The committee took into consideration that President Obama has personally redefined this formerly tough, historically-significant cliche and turned it into a milk toast of total ambiguity and confusion. That made it a clear winner in the 2010 competition.
The judges noted that the President further ambiguated the cliche by making totally vague what the word “here” meant. They were particularly impressed because normally the word Here is clear, straight-forward, and so difficult to make ambiguous. Here is here, right here. “It takes a real silver-tongued devil to say Here, and mean ‘maybe here, maybe there, maybe Timbuktu, maybe nowhere’,” said the head judge. “Most impressive bit of word-dodging since Clinton’s ‘depend on what the definition of is is’ fiasco. Brilliant. Bravo.”
Disclaimer: all stories in Bizarreville are fiction, even the crazy ones that sound like they could be real.
