MOn Wednesday February 21, American President Joe Biden called his counterpart Vladimir Putin a “crazy SOB”, S.O.B. being the English acronym for son of a bitch, literally “son of a bitch”. Forcing journalists to World, who have nevertheless made decorum their iron rule, to reproduce the insult, with their constant concern for precision and “clear and true information”, according to the credo of Hubert Beuve-Méry.
A dive into the daily archives shows that Joe Biden is not, by far, the first to use the sexist insult. So many “son of a bitch” or such qualified people, there have been some in the history of international relations. That The world sometimes coated with a modest “son of a bitch…”, toned down to a more acceptable “bastard” or “bastard” or dispensed with translating from Spanish, English or Russian. Understand who can…
The trivial formula appears in the columns of the newspaper in an article published on April 14, 1951. It comes, raw, from the mouth of Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, who saw red when he did not see red everywhere. The elected official had thus described Democratic President Harry Truman, accused of “sign the death warrant of Western civilization” in an interview with Milwaukee Journal that the anonymous editor of World estimated “more accustomed to more formal vocabulary”.
Prized by Richard Nixon
The word came back on March 16, 1967, during a brief. The projection is this time attributed to Robert Kennedy and intended for President Lyndon Johnson. A few months later, on January 11, 1968, the expression reappeared from the pen of the feminist lawyer Gisèle Halimi, co-author of the Russell report on American war crimes in Vietnam. It is put into the mouth of a helicopter pilot who had just thrown a prisoner into the void.
On October 4, 1969, the expression was attributed to Stalin signing the death warrant of a young dissident. It is taken from an anonymous book which crossed the Iron Curtain titled A morning of Joseph Stalin. On August 10, 1974, a brief this time attributed the insult to Nikita Khrushchev, regarding Richard Nixon. We learn the pronunciation in the original language: soukin syn. Offended this time, Nixon was most often the offender, as later articles in the World. The American president valued this expression, thus qualifying the Chilean President Salvador Allende (driven to suicide) or the Pakistani Prime Minister Ali Bhutto (who ended up hanged).
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