Skip to footer

Kicking the can down the road

During a brief lull between federal financial crises, a look at the vocabulary of playing for time.

  • By Ruth Walker

If there was an idiom that got a workout during the US government shutdown last month, it was "kicking the can down the road."

The agreement that got the lights turned back on in mid-October was widely described as "only kicking the can down the road." It would defer the hard work of decision to another day.

As idioms go, kicking a can down the road is pretty WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). It suggests a boy on some favorite long way home from school, kicking away at a battered soda-pop can until he realizes he's knocked it all the way to his front door.

The national political conversation has been stuck on this particular trope for a few years now.

In the waning days of 2011, it got to be too much for Will Femia of "The Rachel Maddow Show" on cable TV. He blogged, "This 'kick the can down the road' phrase is killing me." He clearly saw a reference to the children's game known as "kick the can" blended with a completely different idiom, "to kick something down the road."

He insisted: "In American English we can kick something down the road, and we can play kick the can, but 'kick the can down the road' is not a thing."

He reinforced his point with a bit of embedded video on how to play "kick the can." It's described as an "urban variant" of hide and seek, in which – instead of tagging a tree or some other "base" to signify "home safe" – the players kick over a large empty can, typically a gallon-sized paint can.

Mr. Femia's may be a minority view, though. Here's what the English-usage website Grammarist says:

"Kick the can down the road, a ubiquitous phrase in American politics over the last few years, is not a reference to the game of kick the can. It refers to the practice of kicking a can ahead of oneself while walking along a road. So, metaphorically, the phrase means to defer conclusive action with a short-term solution."

Appropriately, the usage examples quoted come from politicians, including one from Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, apropos of his own city's finances: "We can't kick the can down the road because we've run out of road."

There's a British idiom that some see as related here: "to kick something into the long grass." The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary defines this as "to reject, remove or stop dealing with a problem."

Ah, but there's a difference between "the long grass" – where the "problem" is inaccessible – and the road, where the "problem" is still in view, and will be caught up with again in just a few steps. Which is perhaps the case to be made for kicking the can down the road.

The same 2011 fiscal crisis that inspired Femia also prompted John L. Smith of the Las Vegas Review-Journal to columnize under the headline: "Dithering politicians can do a lot worse than kick the can."

Describing himself as a child as "an unrepentant road-can kicker," he noted, "The kicking usually ended with a scuffed sneaker and a stubbed toe, but the can served its purpose. It distracted me from throwing rocks, poking a pal with a sharp stick or shouting a tepid obscenity at a neighbor kid. In short, that can kept me moving and out of trouble."

Indeed.

And much better to kick the can than the bucket.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Kicking the can down the road
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Verbal-Energy/2013/1112/Kicking-the-can-down-the-road
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe