I love John Hollinger, and he's as fine a basketball writer as there is, but in this article, he's sadly become the latest to abuse one of our culture's better metaphors. Namely, he uses the phrase "kiss of death" to refer to a set of characteristics that look bad and turn out, in fact, to be quite bad, just like everyone else does.
That is not the kiss of death. It's only kind of halfway there, maybe. So far as I know, the idea of the kiss of death derives originally from Judas kissing Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane to indicate to his Roman accomplices which dude needed crucifying. So yeah, the part about turning out to signify bad things to come is definitely a component of the kiss of death metaphor. But the key, the very thing that makes it a rich metaphor, is that, on the surface, it appears to be quite a good thing. Back when dudes kissed other dudes without being accused of also wanting to have sex with each other, a kiss from your friend was generally a welcome gesture. Not so much in Jesus' case, it turned out. It was about the coldest thing Judas could've done, if you think about it, much crueller than just shouting "Grab the hippie guy!" And every time someone robs the image of its tragic/ironic power by using it to describe a run-of-the-mill bummer, I get angry enough to...to write a fucking blog post. It's nice that we're all so culturally semi-literate, but it'd be even better if we could stop using "kiss of death" to the point that we give the metaphor it's very own kiss of death.
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Next must come the "Killing the Reverse Play" post.
I leave one phony review on google maps under a co-worker's name and now I become him. The transformative powers of technology are terrifying.
-MDSmit aka. my black co-worker doppleganger L Goolsby
Yes, the unfailing failure of commentators to grasp the true definition of a reverse is infuriating. Gregg Eastebrook harps on the issue from time to time, I believe.
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