Meaning
The practice of making malicious attacks on an opponent's character, private life, or reputation instead of arguing the case on its merits - the stock in trade of negative campaigning, and the reason election season so often feels like a bombardment of personal smears rather than debate. Always disapproving - it describes attacks judged unfair or irrelevant; a candidate's 'mudslinging' accusation is itself a standard counterattack. Regional use: General English; American political origin.
Origin
The metaphor is as old as dirt-throwing, but the American compound is surprisingly specific: Etymonline dates mudslinging, harsh criticism, to 1876, from mud plus sling, and mudslinger follows for the person who hurls it. The word was fully current in political argument within a generation: Theodore Roosevelt's 1906 address The Man with the Muck Rake contains the rebuke that 'Some persons are sincerely incapable of understanding that to denounce mud slinging does not mean the endorsement of whitewashing' - a sentence that pairs mudslinging with whitewashing and gives a sense of how worked-over the imagery already was. Wiktionary defines the noun as casting aspersions with intent to discredit, and the same speech of Roosevelt's gave English muckraker, the investigative journalist, harvested from the same mucky field. The dirt, in short, was flying from both directions long before television made a profession of it.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- mudslinger
- sling mud
Usage Examples
- The race turned to mudslinging in its final week, with both sides trading allegations about decades-old business deals.
- She promised a campaign about schools and roads, then authorized the mudslinging flyer that arrived on Saturday.
- Voters told pollsters they were tired of the mudslinging, yet the attack ads kept pulling the biggest audiences.