Swivel Eyed Loons

If you are at a dinner party with a journalist, the best thing to do is use simple language.  The last thing you want to be is quotable.  Whoever it was who said,  "It's fine. There's really no problem. The MPs just have to do it because the associations tell them to, and the associations are all mad, swivel-eyed loons," must be wishing he hadn't used that particular phrase.  If only he'd stopped after mad I don't believe it would have made the national press.  It would have been the swivel-eyed loons part that would have caused the whipping out of shorthand pad and pencil.  

When I heard the phrase on the radio this morning I was intrigued.  The conservative party seem to believe that one mad reference is not enough.  After Michael Gove's 'bonkeroony' comment I thought he must have issued the quote but on reading more about the story the quote was referring to the people are anti-Europe, which Gove has openly said he is.  I had never heard the phrase before and thought it was an excellent example of creativity but it turns out it has been used before.

I wanted a definition of what the phrase actually means, as people in Government seem to be very upset by it. 

Picture of a Loon from the Loon Preservation Committee Website

The word 'loon' is defined as a crazy or simple minded person and dates back to 1400 Middle English.  It probably a contraction of the word lunatic (rather than being anything to do with the bird), which derives from the late 13th century and means someone who is mentally ill, often epileptic and comes from the Latin for moon, 'luna', as they believed that mental illness was caused by the moon. 

I think Dickens used the term, swivel-eyed to describe someone with a squint but it has come to mean someone who can't see things straight; someone who is unable to see the truth because they are mad. 

So, in the phrase we have the wonderful, journalistic trick of the triple whammy.  Actually, to be fair to journalists, I think it's a Taoist thing.  I was once told by a Taoist that if someone told you something three times you should listen to it and if I didn't believe what he was saying then I should read the Tao of Pooh and the Te of Piglet.  I'm still not quite sure why he didn't suggest reading the Tao Te Ching.

Was whoever put these three things together in the presence of a journalist the first to do so?
Not according to Twitter.  I searched for swivel-eyed loon and was surprised at the results. I expected the first reference to these three words together to be the 17th of May, when the Telegraph published the story but no.  Before then, there were several people using the three words together to imply that the person they were talking about was a racist.  Terry Christian tells someone who was complaining that Richard Dawkins had made an anti-Semitic remark, "What Dawkins said wasn't reckless or inflammatory unless you are a swivel-eyed loon bused in from the 12th Century."  There were lots of references to UKIP members as swivel-eyed loons and Ed Balls and John Redwood were specifically named as S.E.L.s.  Then there were lots of references to spotting  S.E.Ls on Question Time.  The first person to use the phrase, according to my Twitter research, was Rhodri Marsden   on 28th May 2009.  He continued to be the only person to tweet the phrase until the 5th of August 2010, when a steady stream of other people started to use it. 

Rhodri's twitter profile says that he writes for the Independent, plays with Scritti Polliti and used to be moderately funny once.  Although, I had never heard of him, Twitter gives him a big blue tick, which I think means he is real but not normal. (none of my normal friends get the tick). He doesn't seem to claim to have been the inventor of the phrase, though. From his photos I can see that he likes trees, plays music, watches TV, plays scrabble, grows large courgettes and I'm thinking we could be friends.  Then I panic, that my search for this wordsmith has turned me into a stalker and I find out that he writes a column on Social Awkwardness.  #Awkward.