英语阅读：Spin doctor
Reader question: What is a “spin doctor”?My comments: A spin doctor is not to be confused with a medical doctor who
treats patients to cure them of disease.
A spin doctor on the other hand is someone who “treats” a story (or
mistreats it, but we’ll come to that later). He “spins” a story, you see, as in
the phrase “spin a yarn”, meaning to tell a long and winding story.
A “yarn” is a strand of thread, long and winding as a result from being
spun from, say, a spinning machine. For centuries, though, “spinning a yarn” has
also been an idiom for telling a tale, especially a long and winding tale as
told by sailors and other seafaring people. As they relate their stories, these
people, everyone a Robinson Crusoe, tend to exaggerate over their adventures
abroad. Hence, spinning yarns became synonymous for telling fabricated stories,
too, that is, stories that might not be entirely true.
Not to stray too far, let’s get back to the term “spin doctor”, who is
generally speaking a media relations advisor to a government or a political
party or a PR expert hired by a company. The jobs of these people are
essentially to “treat” information (to suit their propaganda needs), much in the
way a doctor “treats” a patient. Have you ever heard of phrases like a “doctored
photo”, for example? That means the photo is not genuine, not the way it
originally looks like, but edited. Similarly, spin doctors often purge
unfavorable facts and figures from stories to be released to the public.
To do that, they have to “spin”, of course. That is, twist things around,
and generally try to “put a positive spin” on anything undesirable happening.
They do that by, for example, hiding unfavorable facts while highlighting
favorable figures.
That is, so that the story reads like a feather in the cap rather than a
slap in the face. That’s how most press releases read, is it not?
Anyways this, for your reference, from Phrases.org.uk: So, why ‘spin’? For
the derivation of that we need to go back to yarn. We know that sailors and
other storytellers have a reputation for spinning yarns. Given a phrase in the
language like ‘spin a yarn’, we might expect to assume that a yarn was a tall
tale and that the tellers spun it out. That’s not quite right though. Until the
phrase was coined, yarn was just thread. The phrase was coined as an entity,
just meaning ‘tell a tale’. That came about in the early 19th century and was
first written down in James Hardy Vaux’s A new and comprehensive vocabulary of
the flash language, in 1812: “Yarning or spinning a yarn, signifying to relate
their various adventures, exploits, and escapes to each other.” So, spin became
associated with telling a story. It began to be used in a political and
promotional context in the late 1980s. For example, in the Guardian Weekly,
January 1978: “The CIA can be an excellent source , though, like
every other, its offerings must be weighed for factuality and spin.” From there
it is a small step for the people employed to weave reports of factual events
into palatable stories to be called ‘spin doctors’.
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