Nobody Likes a Whistleblower (or a Wrayer, Quadruplator, or Emphanist)
February 24, 2014
By Dennis Baron
A law firm that specializes in defending whistleblowers has started a petition on change.org to persuade dictionaries and thesauruses to ditch their derogatory synonyms for whistleblower in favor of positive terms:
[W]histleblowers are increasingly stepping forward on behalf of the public good. Yet that old school-yard mentality of "nobody likes a snitch" persists. It's high time for a change.
The lawyers want the definers of English to replace negative synonyms like betrayer, fink, and snitch with uplifting ones like watchdog, truthteller, and fraud-buster. All these negatives "mean fewer people coming forward to protect us when they see something wrong." And that, in turn, means fewer whistleblowers fired, disciplined, or fleeing to Russia, which equals fewer clients for the firm.
There are laws protecting whistleblowers, and both government and corporate policies of "see something, say something." And once in a while a whistleblower is celebrated as a hero, like when Upton Sinclair exposed the unsavory practices of the meatpacking industry in The Jungle in 1906, though five publishers rejected the book because it was too negative, plus, nobody likes a whistleblower.
And that's the problem: whistleblowing may lead to beneficial change, but it's also true that nobody likes a whistleblower. Most dictionaries and thesauruses list a few negative synonyms for whistleblower, but the Oxford English Dictionary, which is not a target of the petition, lists 56 synonyms, and all but one or two of them are negative. That's because speakers of English, the ultimate source of dictionary definitions, don't like whistleblowers. And even if a petition suddenly made whistleblowers popular, law firms specializing in whistleblower cases would still have fewer clients.
But that's not going to happen, because, whether or not you're a fan of the surveillance state, not liking whistleblowers is nothing new. According to the online OED's built-in historical thesaurus, negative terms for whistleblower are among the oldest negative words in English, going back to wrayer, used around 1100 to mean ‘betrayer, snitch.' Others include: wrobber, denunciator, sycophant, quadruplator, emphanist, whiddler, runner, slag, squeak, type, telegraph, pig, rounder, screamer, shopper, narker, tout, rat fink, informer, and deep throat. That's a whole lot of negativity, and it suggests that even if whistleblowers perform a valuable service, they themselves are not perceived as folks you'd want to hang around with, let alone friend on Facebook. The lawyers at whistleblower-insider.com might want the likes of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden for clients, but they might not want to meet them for a pint after work.
It's true that many of the OED's synonyms for informer are obsolete. These days no one launches petition drives to redeem the image of whiddlers and quadruplators, hoping that more whiddlers and quadruplators will come forward to report fraud, waste, or abuse. But the OED also tells us that there has never been a time when English was without a word for whistleblower, or when words for whistleblower have not been negative. The whistleblower's image has never been good.
It doesn't look like change.org's whistleblower petition is going to succeed, especially because so far, only 69 people have signed it. That's not enough of a groundswell to improve the whistleblower's dictionary profile. Plus signing a petition isn't enough to change a definition. You actually have to start using whistleblower and its synonyms both positively and often to effect that kind of change.
Of course, it would be great if petitions could change English, but as the exchange below shows, it takes more than 100,000 signatures to do that.
Dear Mr. Webster:

Life today is so indefinite, so uncertain. I'm sure that if you got rid of the indefinite pronoun and the word "uncertainty," things would get better. I am attaching a change.org petition with 100,000 signatures. If you do not do this, we will not read your dictionary.

Yours truly,

Unsure in Missoula
_____
Dear Unsure in Missoula:

We feel your pain. But if you want to change the dictionary, petitioning us won't help. Of course, every lexicographer has their price, especially ones like us who are former wealthy Nigerian princes and princesses. So please send us your banking particulars and wire $1.74 million to show your good faith to our account at the Cayman Islands Bank. Once we receive confirmation that the funds have been deposited, we will mail you a certificate suitable for framing making you the boss of English, and we will turn our attention to defining drinks with little paper umbrellas in them on the beach.

Good luck,

N. Webster
In short, petitioning lexicographers to change a definition has about as much chance of working as sending them threatening letters made up of words cut out of magazines.

A Whistlestop Tour of "Whistleblowers"
July 19, 2013
By Ben Zimmer
Edward Snowden's leaking of National Security Agency information has put the term whistleblower back in the news. Since the early 1970s, whistleblower has come to be seen as a positive term, but before that it had been decidedly negative for many decades.
As I describe in my "Word on the Street" column for the Wall Street Journal, it was Ralph Nader who successfully rehabilitated whistleblower from its previous incarnation as a slightly nicer way to say "rat," "fink," or "squealer." Let's take a look at the term's evolution.
The earliest examples of whistleblowers are, unsurprisingly, people blowing actual whistles, particularly boxing and football referees whose whistleblowing signaled an official break in the action. The earliest figurative extensions of "blowing the whistle" simply have to do with stopping some activity:
"Ah, say, Sadie! Blow the whistle on that, can't you?" says I.
— Sewell Ford, "'Professor Shorty' McCabe, Physical Culturist: Beating Ripley to It," San Francisco Chronicle, Apr 4, 1909
Shortly after Claude went limping past the 40th Mile Stone, he had to blow the Whistle on Friend Wife, who was getting ready to send Daughter to Europe and put Son in Yale.
— George Ade, New Fables in Slang, 1916
By the 1930s, "blowing the whistle" developed a new meaning: not just stopping something, but trying to stop something shady from going on by making a fuss. The "whistleblower" became an object of scorn among those social groups where informing on one's peers was heavily stigmatized. In my Wall Street Journal column, I mention this example from 1936, brought to my attention by Garson O'Toole, in which a sportswriter uses the whistleblower tag on Jacob Pfefer, a promoter of professional wrestling who had grown disillusioned with the sport's artifice:
Jake is a whistle-blower, which is unforgivable. Not only that, but he tweetles his cop-caller with thick Yiddish overtones. A couple of years ago, during one of his numerous altercations with the Curley clique, he mounted a soap box in Times Square and screamed "All rassling is a lousy fake! I know, because I've been in the business for 20 years! I never saw a rassling match yet, or had anything to do with one. that was on the level!"
— Jack Miley, Washington Post, Apr. 27, 1936
Sportswriters were particularly enamored with the term. Barry Popik located other examples from 1936 written by John Lardner (son of Ring Lardner), including one describing how baseball legend Rogers Hornsby, then nearing the end of his career, had launched a "clean-up campaign" of the woeful St. Louis Browns, despite the fact that "Mr. Hornsby is not a whistle-blower by nature."
Another colorful example from the era had to do with John F. Curry, who led New York City's Tammany Hall political machine until he was ousted from the position by internal foes. Curry exacted his revenge in 1938 by testifying about Tammany's various rackets to Manhattan District Attorney Thomas E. Dewey. Here's how syndicated columnist Leonard Lyons described Curry's one complaint about the press coverage:
John F. Curry, the former leader of Tammany Hall, became the subject of much comment as the result of his revelations of the secret operations of Tammany. But despite the scorn with which the testimony of a "whistle blower" usually is received, Curry objected to only one reference to him in the reports of his testimony. He called Damon Runyon to his side. "Damon," he complained, "how did you ever come to write — that I was 70 years old?"
— Leonard Lyons, Washington Post, Sept. 7, 1938
Victor Steinbok informed me of another usage of whistleblower from around this time, in a 1937 Life magazine article that uses the term to describe a union official who blows a whistle to signal the beginning of a sit-down strike. I haven't found any further evidence that these union whistleblowers played a role in the development of the term, but certainly whistleblower came to be recognized as a nasty epithet in union circles. This was still the case in 1960, when Teamsters Union chief Jimmy Hoffa, not known for betraying secrets, was accused of being a whistleblower by a fellow labor leader:
Paul Hall [president of the Seafarers International Union of North America] clarified yesterday which of his several maritime labor "hats" he was wearing last week when he attacked James R. Hoffa as a "notorious fink and whistle blower."
— Edward A. Morrow, New York Times, Apr. 20, 1960
A decade later, consumer advocate Ralph Nader began to use whistleblower and whistleblowing in a much more positive light, in a series of speeches calling for "professional responsibility" in corporations and government. Nader's activism turned the expression around, so that now when Snowden is called a whistleblower, it is often viewed as an expression of sympathy or solidarity with his actions. As I told Time's Newsfeed, calling Snowden a leaker is seen by some media outlets as a more neutral designation. It's a testament to just how much Nader and his allies were able to reshape the once-disparaged whistleblower into a term that evokes honorable civic-mindedness.