Former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg’s disappointing debut on the talk stage in Las Vegas on Wednesday night time, when he was roundly pummeled by his fellow Democratic presidential candidates, was maybe greatest summarized by one in every of his throwaway strains. As he tried to be a magnet for the moderators during one of the night time’s many crosstalk-heavy free-for-alls, Bloomberg could possibly be heard grumbling in frustration, “What am I, hen liver?”
On Twitter, as The Daily Dot noted, Bloomberg’s apart was greeted with bemusement. Since he was off-camera when he stated it, some guessed that it was another candidate who stated it. However as NBC’s transcript corroborates, the words came from Bloomberg. And the transcript additional confirms that he stated “What am I, hen liver?” – not “chopped liver,” the more acquainted form of the minimizing expression. On a night when seemingly nothing went Bloomberg’s method, even that selection of idiom opened him as much as critique. When The Washington Publish’s Josh Dawsey live-tweeted the line, several kibitzers replied that Bloomberg erred and ought to have stated “chopped liver.”
On one degree, that’s unfair to Bloomberg. He wasn’t fallacious, per se—whereas “chopped liver” is certainly the more widespread formulation, its history exhibits that “hen liver” (or more absolutely, “chopped hen liver”) is one other variant of the expression.
But if Bloomberg is trying to escape something about his the best way his critics paint him – the cloistered Northeasterner of a certain age—it won't have carried out him a lot good. Whereas "chopped liver" has gone mainstream and stuck round, "(chopped) hen liver" puts him in an older, extra Northeastern group.
The expression owes its roots to the delicacies brought over by Japanese European Jewish immigrants like Bloomberg’s own ancestors. The pâté-style chopped liver served as a aspect dish on Jewish tables (generally known as gehakte leber in Yiddish) has historically been comprised of the livers of calves or, yes, chickens. In accordance with phrase sleuth Barry Popik, chopped liver turned a well-liked dish amongst Jewish New Yorkers by around 1910, and a few many years later, “chopped liver” and its variants began getting into the lexicon by way of playful turns of phrase. Complaints about being handled as nothing extra than “chopped liver” spread especially among the many entertainment business, which introduced a lot Yiddish-inflected humor to the plenty.
The earliest recognized example in print, as Kara Kovalchik reported on Mental Floss, appears in a 1949 semi-autobiographical novel by the comedian Joey Adams, The Curtain By no means Falls. The protagonist of the story is a young stand-up comic named Jackie Mason (perhaps inspiring the stage identify of the real-life Jackie Mason, born Yacov Moshe Maza, who would dedicate a couple of pages to “chopped liver” in his 1990 guide, How to Speak Jewish). Within the novel, when a showgirl seems like that Jackie isn’t paying her enough consideration, she says, “You’ve been nice sufficient, however what am I, chopped liver or something?” Jackie responds, “Are you kiddin’? You’re the sexiest-looking factor up right here. But you all the time seemed concerned about all of the shmoes.”
Another variation on the theme was used by Jimmy Durante on his tv present in 1954, in line with Jonathan Lighter’s Historical Dictionary of American Slang: “Now that ain’t chopped liver.” That follows the pattern of earlier expressions like “That ain’t peanuts,” “That ain’t persimmons,” and “That ain’t hay.” Jonathon Inexperienced, in his Green’s Dictionary of Slang, takes the “persimmons” model all the best way again to 1851 in American usage.
When William Safire asked the lexicographer Sol Steinmetz about the “chopped liver” expression in a 1998 New York Occasions “On Language” column, Steinmetz provided, “Chopped liver is merely an appetizer or aspect dish, not as essential as hen soup or gefilte fish. Therefore it was typically used amongst Jewish comedians within the Borscht Belt as a humorous metaphor for one thing or somebody insignificant.”
Chopped hen liver might sound even more insignificant, strengthened by the fact that “hen liver” carries its personal set of pejorative connotations having to do with meekness and cowardice. In 1968, syndicated columnist Jim Bishop wrote about seeing Don Rickles carry out at a Miami Seashore nightclub: Rickles, together with his caustic insult comedy, “chopped the viewers like hen liver.”
When the comic actor James Coco achieved fame as a frequent “Tonight Show” guest in 1972, he advised The Philadelphia Inquirer that he was shocked to not be recognized in Rome. “I might walk down the road and no one looked at me,” Coco stated. “I assumed, ‘What am I? Chopped hen liver?” That very same line, with “chopped hen liver,” was additionally utilized by Tony Curtis enjoying a flashy Hollywood producer in the 1980 mystery movie The Mirror Crack’d. And in 1991, Henry Winkler stated the same factor in an interview with The Chicago Tribune a few TV movie he was starring in.
The Bloomberg-style model, with “chopped” elided, additionally has some priority. For example, when The New York Occasions creating new titles of “senior author” and “senior photographer” for a choose group of staffers in 1990, Chicago Tribune media columnist James Warren wrote, “Choosing any such group in a workplace would convey grousing. Individuals omitted marvel, ‘Am I hen liver?’”
One instance strikes even closer to house. In 2002, when Bloomberg was mayor of New York, he confronted contentious contract negotiations with the United Federation of Academics. The union’s president, Randi Weingarten, informed The New York Post that the academics didn’t need to strike, “but she stated they really feel like ‘hen liver’ for being with no contract for 16 months and dealing with a second yr of finances cuts.”
After getting eviscerated at Wednesday’s debate, Bloomberg might know what that seems like too.
Src: Is Mike Bloomberg Really ‘Chicken Liver?’
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