Mush from the Wimp
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"Mush from the Wimp" is a phrase referring to a journalistic mistake from 1980, when that phrase (intended as an internal joke) was published as the title of a Boston Globe editorial.
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[edit] Origins of the phrase
On March 15, 1980, the Boston Globe ran an editorial that began:
- Certainly it is in the self-interest of all Americans to impose upon themselves the kind of economic self-discipline that President Carter urged repeatedly yesterday in his sober speech to the nation. As the President said, inflation, now running at record rates, is a cruel tax, one that falls most harshly upon those least able to bear the burden.
There was nothing exceptional about it except the headline: "Mush from the Wimp".
In 1984, the late Kirk Scharfenberg acknowledged that he was the author of the headline. "I meant it as an in-house joke and thought it would be removed before publication," he wrote. "It appeared in 161,000 copies of the Globe the next day."[1]
[edit] Later usage
The phrase became well-known enough that eleven years later a Globe editorial chastising the Iditarod for caving in to pressure from animal rights activitists was titled "More Wimps from the Mush".
[edit] References
All three of Boston Globe articles mentioned in this entry are in the Globe's for-pay archives without individual linkable URLs.
