fall guy
It’s getting to be a habit. Another day, another minister called to the Commons to answer an urgent question on the government’s repeated insistence on turning Brexit into a farce. With David Davis unavailable and Robin Walker still in rehab after his working over the day before, this time it was Steve Baker’s turn to be the fall guy.
The jury is out on Baker. Some wonder if he is an intelligent man trying to be stupid or a stupid man trying to be intelligent. On this showing, the latter is still the more likely, though, to be fair, he did have a thankless task. Before Christmas, Davis had tried to convince parliament that fictional impact assessments were in fact real. Now his sidekick was being asked to convince MPs that a genuine impact assessment, leaked to the press the night before, was largely fictional. (Skip the rest)
今回取り上げる表現は、fall guy です。
“fall” は基礎単語で多くの意味を持ちますが、”fall guy” という表現でどう使われているのか見当がつきませんでした。そこで、辞書を確認していきます。LDOCEをみると、”someone who is punished for someone else’s crime or mistake” とあり、Cambridge Dictionary には、”a person who is falsely blamed for something that has gone wrong, or for a crime that they have not committed” と定義されていました。また、LDOCEには類語として “scapegoat” が挙げられていました。『ジーニアス英和辞典』(大修館)をみると、「[主に米略式](1)人の罪を負わされる人、身代わり、(2)騙されやすい人」とあります。“scapegoat” は過去の記事で取り上げられていていたので、確認してみてください。 (OkaUchi)
cf.throw sb under the bus/ scapegoat/ offer a goat for
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/A30/20121205/1354667274
cf.scapegoat
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/A30/20100705/1278333658
