Leopards Eating People's Faces: The Birth Of A Saying
A pastime of mine is Googling the etymology of words, sayings, and phrases. But there’s one that I don’t have to do, because I was (virtually) there when it was coined, by UK author and RPG writer Adrian Bott. (Bluesky: @cavalorn).
I’d followed Adrian (aka Cavalorn) for several years, I think since the Live Journal days. His tweet quickly went viral, and then beyond viral, to the point where it was the saying that was viral, not the tweet. I’ve had arguments online with people when I claimed that Adrian invented the saying, only to have them insist it was an old saying that he was merely referencing.
He wasn’t. It wasn’t. And he coined it then and there for a reason.
If you look at the date, Adrian made that tweet on a Friday morning in October in 2015. This was five months after David Cameron’s Conservatives had won an overall majority in a UK General Election, freeing them of their previous dependence on the Liberal Democrat coalition partners, and allowing them to pursue their austerity politics (their phrase, not mine) with neither restraint nor brake.
So this was a Friday morning after a Thursday evening, and if you know the UK, you’ll know that Thursday evening is when the BBC broadcasts Question Time on BBC 1, a programme that allows an audience of general (ish) members of the public to question a panel of politicians and the occasional non-political expert / celebrity.
Sometimes, the audience won’t so much ask a question as make a statement. And sometimes, as with this single mother who, having voted Conservative only to find them then cutting the universal credit she depended on to feed her children, they’ll cry at the unfairness of the polices they intended to be applied to others being applied instead to themselves.
And this of course occurred on Thursday 15th October, 2015. If Adrian was the author of the saying, this woman was his unwitting muse.
It wasn’t, initially at least, Adrian’s tweet that went viral that morning: instead it was the clip of this particular audience member, and as you can no doubt imagine, in the left-leaning echo chamber that was my then slice of Twitter, there wasn’t much sympathy for her. (Having said that, I’m not sure there would have been much sympathy for her amongst the right either, given that they were in favour of cutting benefits).
There were dozens of tweets flying around, all attempting to express the essential annoyance at those who define “essential government spending” as spending that benefits them and theirs (now) and “wasteful government spending” as spending that doesn’t benefit them (at least not yet), illustrating their essential failings of both empathy and imagination. (And the selfishness of being happy to see other people hurt, but feeling outraged when that hurt reaches them).
But of all those tweets, it was Adrian’s that managed to capture this sentiment in a way that through its underlying absurdity was both whimsical and universal.
And from that beginning, it transcended the tweet and become a meme, a saying, a phrase.
You’ll see it everywhere, in thousands of versions. People will use it in text (“Something, something, leopards eating people’s faces”). It even appeared as a plot line in a comic.
And of course, people continue to complain bitterly when the policies they voted for affect them, since they voted for hurt to be inflicted only on those they perceive deserve it, and of course that isn’t them.
And given that a people’s-face-eating-leopard took office in the US four days ago, we’re seeing a lot of it now.
Of course, that post was replied to with many variations of the Leopards eating people’s faces meme.
I think the world will continue to be full of people who vote for Leopards to eat what they blithely assume will be other people’s faces, and Adrian’s saying will continue to resonate. Nearly ten years on, I think we can safely say that it’s here to stay. It’s part of the English language now.
I wonder if the Germans have a phrase for it?
Oh.
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