{"id":17679,"date":"2018-11-26T08:41:31","date_gmt":"2018-11-26T16:41:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=17679"},"modified":"2018-11-26T08:41:31","modified_gmt":"2018-11-26T16:41:31","slug":"in-the-tank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2018\/11\/26\/in-the-tank\/","title":{"rendered":"in the tank"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/sport\/world-chess-championship-2018\"><cite>Grauniad<\/cite>\u2019s coverage of the fascinating World Chess Championship<\/a> has frequently used the idiom <i>in the tank<\/i> to express that one of the players is behind and is taking up a lot of time thinking about their terrible disadvantage. I am totally unfamiliar with that usage\u2014to me, <i>in the tank<\/i> means that the player (or team) in question is deliberately losing.\r\n<p>I think I have seen the verb <i>tank<\/i> used both for intentional and unintentional losing (although not in a close loss), but <i>in the tank<\/i> to me is always an allegation of corruption.\r\n<p>The OED has both, but the corruption-related one is a sports-specific term, and the non-deliberate phrase applies to more general failure, f\u2019r\u2019ex stocks, industries or personal lives. They don\u2019t say so, but the usage is similar to <i>in the toilet<\/i>, and may be related. It\u2019s possible that the version that is not an accusation slipped in to chess description because chess is different enough from other sports (if it indeed is a sport, which it probably isn\u2019t, but the <cite>Grauniad<\/cite> coverage is under the sport heading) that it didn\u2019t immediately strike the commentators as inappropriate.\r\n<p>How does it sound to y\u2019all? Does it matter if the phrase is broken up\u2014saying a player is <i>in to the tank<\/i> or <i>deeply in the tank<\/i> or something like that?\r\n<p>Thanks,<br>-Ed.\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The word &#8216;tank&#8217; has a surprising variety of slang meanings, actually.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-idioms"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17679"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17679\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17681,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17679\/revisions\/17681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}