It's a warning, not an instruction manual
There's a moment in Sports Night where Isaac Jaffe, the managing editor, figures out that an unfavourable quote about the show attributed to a source within the parent company came from the person who has been pretending to help him all day. He says, "JJ, if I find out that quote came from you I'll own your ass. I mean I'll absolutely own it."
This is a fairly common expression these days. In my opinion it came from computer games, where victory in a given arena or map or level enabled the victor to claim he "owned" the arena, or map, or level. Mutating as slang is prone to do, it soon came to be applied not to the venue but to the vanquished opponent, who "gets owned".
It is hardly surprising that Gordon Brown is apparently unfamiliar with this particular sense of "own". He is shaky enough on the original sense of ownership, poisoned by Proudhon as he is. Yet he has evidently come across the phrase "I'll own your ass" recently, because this week he announced that henceforth he did, in fact, own all our asses.
That is to say, his ownership of our asses would be presumed, unless we actively took steps to reclaim them for ourselves. As an idea this is so self-evidently totalitarian in conception that I'm staggered that even so unreconstructed an old statist as Gordon Brown could bring himself to announce it, let alone have the breathtaking neck to try to dress it up as a reclaimed liberty. (Mind you, that strategy has been handsomely successful in the past.) But, of course, he wouldn't be alone: he'd have the usual cheerleaders.
This is a fairly common expression these days. In my opinion it came from computer games, where victory in a given arena or map or level enabled the victor to claim he "owned" the arena, or map, or level. Mutating as slang is prone to do, it soon came to be applied not to the venue but to the vanquished opponent, who "gets owned".
It is hardly surprising that Gordon Brown is apparently unfamiliar with this particular sense of "own". He is shaky enough on the original sense of ownership, poisoned by Proudhon as he is. Yet he has evidently come across the phrase "I'll own your ass" recently, because this week he announced that henceforth he did, in fact, own all our asses.
That is to say, his ownership of our asses would be presumed, unless we actively took steps to reclaim them for ourselves. As an idea this is so self-evidently totalitarian in conception that I'm staggered that even so unreconstructed an old statist as Gordon Brown could bring himself to announce it, let alone have the breathtaking neck to try to dress it up as a reclaimed liberty. (Mind you, that strategy has been handsomely successful in the past.) But, of course, he wouldn't be alone: he'd have the usual cheerleaders.
posted by Novus at 18:07
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