mush from the wimp

"Mush from the Wimp" is a phrase referring to a classic journalistic "oops" from 1980, when that phrase (intended as an internal joke) was published as the title of a Boston Globe editorial.

Origins of the phrase

On March 15, 1980, the Boston Globe ran an editorial that began:

Certainly it is in the self-interest of all Americans to impose upon themselves the kind of economic self-discipline that President Carter urged repeatedly yesterday in his sober speech to the nation. As the President said, inflation, now running at record rates, is a cruel tax, one that falls most harshly upon those least able to bear the burden.

There was nothing exceptional about it except the headline: "Mush from the Wimp". In 1984, the late Kirk Scharfenberg acknowledged that he was the author of the headline. "I meant it as an in-house joke and thought it would be removed before publication," he wrote. "It appeared in 161,000 copies of the Globe the next day."

Later usage

The phrase became well-known enough that eleven years later a Globe editorial chastising the Iditarod for caving in to pressure from animal rights activitists was titled "More Wimps from the Mush". In fact, the headline has been credited with pushing the word "wimp" into prominence. Although the original Globe editorial seems to have been titled "Mush from the Wimp," numerous citations refer to it as "More Mush from the Wimp."

References

All three of Boston Globe articles mentioned in this entry are in the Globe's for-pay archives without individual linkable URLs. Boston Globe website