Spin doctor——查字典英语网_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Spin doctor——查字典英语网

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 [of information], 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’.