Meaning
Used disparagingly of people abandoning a failing organization, activity, or cause in large numbers as soon as its decline becomes visible, rather than staying to help repair it. The comparison is always critical of the people leaving, never neutral. Disparaging and accusatory; the speaker implicitly sides with whoever stays behind. Regional use: General English.
Origin
Rats living in a ship's hull were long believed to flee the vessel before it foundered, and the observation became proverbial remarkably early: Morris Tilley's dictionary of 16th- and 17th-century English proverbs records the saying about mice or rats leaving a sinking ship from the late sixteenth century, and Shakespeare alludes to it in The Tempest (c. 1611), where the rats have 'instinctively quit' a doomed craft. Dictionary references date the application to human behaviour to around 1600. The sailors' belief that rats foresee disaster in advance is superstition - the animals simply escape when their hull floods - but the metaphor of timely self-preservation became a staple of political and business commentary, common in Victorian fiction and ever since.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- like rats abandoning a sinking ship
- like rats leaving a sinking ship
- rats deserting a sinking ship
Usage Examples
- Long-serving aides resigned like rats deserting a sinking ship once the audit began.
- Sponsors are quitting the league like rats from a sinking ship, according to this morning's reports.
- He accused his neighbours of deserting the community garden like rats from a sinking ship at the first sign of budget cuts.