Originally published at: Crypto fraudster awaits trial in jail after witness tampering | Boing Boing
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One down. Let’s do a president!
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Fried should be allowed to complain loudly about the “two-tiered justice system” that put him behind bars but continues to allow trump to walk free.
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Wait, but I thought Scam Bankrun-Fraud was some poor sap who just did an oopsie setting up his super-complicated Web3 business. This almost makes him seem like a sociopathic mastermind or something. Huh!
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PEDANTRY ALERT
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can’t tell whether the gauntness is a expressionist flourish, or somebody decided to squeeze the image and add those silly blurs of distraction on the side.
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To tow the line would be to carry the demarcation of human freedom ever further.
But CNN has spelled it correctly. Historically, one would be obligated to toe the line.
Perhaps Kaplan intended to use a cliché, as one does, and fumbled.
“Out of the frying Pan, and onto the induction burner,”
Orwell’s advice
Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’ (e. g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgels for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles’ heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a ‘rift’, for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning without those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.
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… surely we’re not asking him to write “tow the line”
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Of course “toeing the line” means the opposite of what they seem to have intended. It means to obey an order, not to disobey or skirt it.
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“But…but…I’m a promising young [rich white cis-het] man!”
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Because he in fact did not “toe the line”, toeing the line means complying.
(Also “flout” and “flaunt” do not mean the same thing. Off topic, but I had to get it out there.)
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I think what they were looking for is “dancing on the edge”, “toeing the line” means following orders, standing where you are supposed to stand. Playing on the border also works.
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This phrase always makes me think of the scene in Hot Millions where Cesar Smith (Peter Ustinov) talks his way into a gentleman’s club.
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Yeah, he’s testing the limits, or taking it to the edge, something that signifies a drop or danger over that line.
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… perhaps a reporter wrote “crossing the line” but a CNN lawyer didn’t like it 
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Not many people know about Egon Schiele’s other career as a courtroom artist.
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I can never remember which one means “play the flute”.
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