I feel it’s my duty to call out ACT leader David
Seymour for his misuse of the expression “dead cat bounce”.
The phrase cropped up in Parliament yesterday when Winston
Peters, under the protection of privilege, tried to divert attention from the scandalous
taxpayer-funded Antarctic junket he arranged for two wealthy friends by naming
Seymour’s former partner as the person responsible for leaking details of his (Peters') superannuation over-payment. (As an aside, are we witnessing the increasingly desperate
flailing of a politician who senses he’s on the ropes? First the pathetic invitation
to Seymour to join him in the boxing ring, and now this?)
Seymour responded by accusing Peters of using “the
old dead-cat bounce – throw something on the table in the hope that it would
overshadow the bad news coming his way”. A Stuff
journalist helpfully tried to explain that “the dead cat strategy is a common
political tactic. It refers to the practice of unveiling a ridiculous,
scurrilous story to take attention away from a more legitimate issue. It’s likened
to throwing a dead cat on the table”.
But that makes no sense and it's not what the expression means. I first
heard the phrase during the share market crash of 1987 and it came, as so many colourful
expressions do (think “lonely as a bastard on Father’s Day”, “as flash as a rat
with a gold tooth”), from an Australian.
Share prices had briefly rallied after a prolonged
and spectacular fall, raising hopes that the worst might be over. But an Aussie
analyst laconically punctured the premature optimism, explaining: “Even a dead
cat bounces”. So the phrase has nothing to do with attempts to create political
distractions, as Seymour and the Stuff
reporter seem to think. The appropriate zoological metaphor in that situation
is “red herring”, which supposedly derives from an attempt to throw hounds off
the trail of a fox by dragging a smelly smoked fish across their path.
