Her raps were bad, not bum

Wednesday, Aug. 29, 2007 | 10 p.m.

Boston

In her new book about coping with life's setbacks, “Here's the Bright Side,” Betty Rollin observes that “people more than survive bum raps; they often thrive on them.”

That line was quoted in Jane Brody's health column in The New York Times, and most readers, blearily paging through the morning papers on Aug. 14, probably read right past the odd phrase it contains. I would have, I know, except that it was repeated in the much more legible headline type: “Thriving After Life's Bum Rap.”

And that bum rap, it turns out, wasn't just a passing fancy: The Web reveals that Rollin's book is subtitled “Of Failure, Fear, Cancer, Divorce, and Other Bum Raps.”

None of those life challenges, however, fits the usual definition of bum rap.

A bum rap, underworld slang from the early 20th century, is a false charge or conviction: “It's a bum rap, I didn't do it, I swear,” says an Elmore Leonard character. The adjective bum, borrowed in the 19th century from the word for a loafer or tramp, means “bad” or “wrong”; a bum knee buckles, a bum steer sends you in the wrong direction. The much older rap, originally a sharp blow, is recorded as criminal slang about 1900. Put them together, and you have “unfounded accusation.”

These days, bum rap is more often used figuratively, to describe bad reputations rather than legal charges. “Being carefree often gets a bum rap,” says a 2005 self-help book. Eggs and lobotomies, their defenders say, have gotten a bum rap. And in 2003 the U.S. defense secretary gave the idiom international currency: “Rumsfeld Says Criticism over Iraq Museum Looting a Bum Rap,” said the Agence France-Presse headline.

No matter how far from the jailhouse bum rap has ranged, though, it isn't often used to mean “unlucky stroke.” Bum rap is about perception, reputation, accusation. Getting cancer, getting fired, or having a mine collapse on you is an event -- the short straw, a raw deal, a tough break. But unless you consider it God's misjudgment on you, it's not a bum rap.

So how did Rollin's editors -- and then the Times' -- end up using bum rap when they meant tough break? Maybe they were reaching back to the earlier sense of rap, and figured “bad hit” was a reasonable translation of bum rap. Maybe they just hadn't listened closely enough to hear the nuance of the idiom.

There's nothing unusual about that kind of negligence, after all.

The day before Brody's piece appeared, David Brooks, in his Times column, summed up a sociologist's portrait of working-class men like this: “They defined themselves as straight-talking, shoot-from-the-hip guys.” Probably not: Shooting from the hip, like shooting off one's mouth, is generally a pejorative.

It's entirely possible that we could choose to forget the difference between bum rap and bad luck. It's a fairly subtle distinction, after all. Compared with using epicenter to mean center and infer for imply and flout for flaunt, tweaking bum rap a bit seems hardly worth protesting.

Bum rap, however, may well resist being reshaped. It has a job to do, and it does it well and regularly; it's not a neglected word, such as disinterested, that's willing to take any assignment just to stay in the game. Rollin's little goof looks like a rare event; nobody else seems interested in recasting bum rap as just another bland synonym for one of life's hard knocks.

Jan Freeman is a columnist for The Boston Globe.