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spin doctor

noun

Etymology

From spin (“a favorable comment or interpretation”) + doctor. First use appears c. 1984 in the New York Times.

  1. derived from doctor
  2. derived from doctour
  3. inherited from doctor
  4. compounded as spin doctor — “spin + doctor”

Definitions

  1. A person employed to gloss over a poor public image (or present it in a better light) in…

    A person employed to gloss over a poor public image (or present it in a better light) in business and politics, especially after unfavourable results have been achieved; a lobbyist; a PR person.

    • Many believed that the reduction in public spending was a disaster but the spin doctors presented it as a triumph for lower taxation.
    • Now that the cold war has ended and political ideologies have been replaced by pollsters and spin doctors, Machiavelli's cleareyed assessments of power dynamics and pragmatic advantage are suddenly in vogue.

  2. To generate spin (a favorable interpretation or bias).

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for spin doctor. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA