Red meat speech?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Red meat speech?

Although it had long been thought that the newer sense of red meat entered our parlance in the 1960s, recent research has found that the use is older than that, dating back to the early 20th century. It originated (or at least achieved widespread use) in the motion picture industry:

An exchange manager recently complained to me if the lack of sensational subjects. His actual words were “They [the public] want red meat and they want it raw.”

—The Nickelodeon, 7 Jan. 1911

He told how ministers, representative citizens, had condemned the motion picture shows, and when he investigated it—the real red meat of the situation—the principal objection seemed to be because the price of admission was cheap.

—The Moving Picture News, 17 February 1912

By the 1920s, the term started to appear in advertising copy for films. An ad in 1928 for the movie Greased Lightning described it as “The Red Meat sort of Picture that You’ll Remember for Weeks,” and a 1926 newspaper ad for The Rainmaker called it “A strong red-meat love drama.”

In the 1940s red meat entered the political lexicon, with its meaning taking on some additional shades of “inflammatory.”

He added the reminder that the leaders of the other Great Powers—Churchill, Stalin and Chiang Kai-Shek—are all older than Roosevelt, as are most of our own warrior chieftains, whom the Republican candidates nevertheless has promised to retain in command. It was a plate of red meat the temporary chairman served as a foretaste of the campaign to come.