俚語 “throw somebody under the bus”是什麽意思？

今天信手從報紙堆裏翻出一張兩個月前的老報紙，溫故知新，讀到一位女讀者 Peggy 的來信，題目是：Bush already threw us under the bus

現摘錄幾句她的“反動”言論：
Regarding " Obama will throw us under bus " (June 7, Letters): We are already under the bus and were put there by President Bush and Dick Cheney and all their old men friends. Bush has put us in a very deep hole financially and we have lost our standing in the rest of  the world……

Peggy 女士反複用到throw somebody under the bus, 照字麵意義是把某人扔到巴士底下。而根據上下文應是對目前總統競選的看法和對現任政府的不滿，與公交車有什麽聯係呢？

本筆者孤陋寡聞，不知其喻義，多虧了網絡的發達，google 後終於搞清其相應的中文意義。

throw somebody under the bus… 拿某人當犧牲品／替罪羊，背叛／出賣某人

用於指一個人為了保護自己而犧牲或出賣別人的情況，也可用於向領導打小報告，說某個人的不是，或是公開批評某個人，使人下不了台，等小人行為。

Ok，各位明白了上麵讀者來信中的throw somebody under the bus 的意義了吧？我就不多言了，莫談政治。  

那麽為什麽用throw somebody under the bus來表示“把某人當犧牲品”？麻煩諸位看官耐心參考下文，問題將迎刃而解。摘自word-detective.com

Dear Word Detective: What is the origin of the phrase “to throw one under the bus”? — Brenda Varney.

Good question, and, it would seem, a timely one as well. It’s hard to pick up a newspaper or turn on the TV these days without hearing of someone being “thrown under the bus.” Last year CNN’s Jack Cafferty declared that “Rather than face Senate confirmation hearings over his reappointment as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Bush White House has decided to simply throw General Peter Pace under the bus.”

Elsewhere, the E-Commerce News warned that a new song royalty scheme would “… throw large webcasters under the bus and put an end to small webcasters’ hopes of one day becoming big.” And a letter to the New York Times cautioned the paper not to “throw doctors under the bus … as the cause of health care costs.”

“To throw someone under the bus” is defined as meaning “to sacrifice; to treat as a scapegoat; to betray,” but I think the key to the phrase really lies in the element of utter betrayal, the sudden, brutal sacrifice of a stalwart and loyal teammate for a temporary and often minor advantage. There is no retirement dinner, no gold watch, for poor schmuck “thrown under the bus.” On the contrary, the scapegoat’s name is liable to disappear from the website overnight.

The earliest solid example of “throw under the bus” found in print so far is from 1991, although a 1984 quote from rock star Cyndi Lauper where she uses the phrase “under the bus” (without “throw”) may or may not count as a sighting. Incidentally, by far the best compilation of citations for the phrase can be found, as usual, at Grant Barrett’s Double-Tongued Dictionary website (www.doubletongued.org).

The exact origin of “thrown under the bus” is, unfortunately, a mystery. Slang expert Paul Dickson, quoted by William Safire in his New York Times magazine column, traces it to sports, specifically the standard announcement by managers trying to get the players to board the team bus: “Bus leaving. Be on it or under it.” The phrase does seem to be popular in sports circles, but few of the citations I have seen from sports publications carry the same overtones of casual, callous betrayal that one finds in non-sporting uses.

Consequently, I have my own theory. I don’t think the “bus” was ever the team bus. As someone who spent a lot of time standing on Manhattan street corners and narrowly avoided being expunged by speeding city buses on several occasions, to me the phrase conjures up the classic urban nightmare of being pushed in front of a bus. As a way to quickly and irreversibly get rid of someone, “throwing” them under a bus in this sense would be the ideal solution and would satisfy the connotations of sudden, cold brutality the phrase usually carries. So I suspect that the phrase has urban origins, and migrated into sports world via players from big cities.