Reader question:

Please explain “spitball some ideas” in this sentence: We can Skype or exchange emails to spitball some ideas.

My comments:

Here, the speaker wants his/her group to exchange ideas and proposals via Skype or email.

Yes, but “spitball”?

Yeah, literally, that’s, like, spitting in the air and see where the spitballs, tiny bits of saliva, fall.

Seriously, that’s about it, too.

Spitballing originally refer to the schoolboy trick of chewing bits of paper into a tiny ball-shaped mass and tossing it around for idle fun or using it as a toy weapon to hit the teacher or a fellow student with.

As a weapon, it’s sometimes done by inserting a spitball into a tube and then shooting it out by blowing hard into the other end. I and most members of my generation used to play that game when we were school age, back in the 1970s, that is.

Come to think of it, back in the day, a long while ago to be sure, children used to have silly games like that, silly, simple, mindless and lots of fun. Today’s children, in contrast, have nothing but technology based plastic or metal gadgets to play with. These manufactured toys are fine and large, not to mention usually expensive, but, if you ask me, are nothing to compare with some of the hand-made toys of yesteryear.

Anyways, spitball is literally a ball made with one’s spit. This term is believed to be American in origin (1840-50, Dictionary.com). Later in the early 1900s, it gained a new usage in baseball, where players sometimes spit on the ball before pitching it, making the slippery ball somewhat less predictable in flight.

In the original sense, since a lot of boys (and a few girls, too perhaps) tossed spitballs for idle entertainment and without serious purpose or intent, people began to describe exchanging rough ideas in the same way.

Nowadays, people, especially businesspeople, like to say they’re spitballing when they make a proposal to see other people’s responses and reactions.

If all of them are doing this together, they will be, to use a lofty sounding business-speak, brainstorming.

By the way, I like American idioms and expressions a lot. Consistent with the fact that America is a young country, American English often sounds juvenile, even delinquent, in the sense that it sometimes sounds king of lawless, or law-less, and unruly or, rather, rule-less.

Which, I am sure, if you ask the child in all of us, is just great.

All right, here are media examples of people spitballing everywhere:

1. This seems a good time to gauge the filmic prospects of The Turner Diaries. I bought my copy—out of raw, morbid curiosity—at a Virginia gun show in the mid-90s. Back then, the novel’s Banana Time fanaticism seemed tailor-made for the antigovernment mania of the Clinton era. It even inspired a half-dozen real-life crime sprees, including the Oklahoma City bombing.

Written by Andrew Macdonald (the pen name of neo-Nazi activist William Pierce) in the late 70s, The Turner Diaries is a look back at the great global race war of the 90s, told from the perspective of a diary found in the far future. The book follows Earl Turner, a Joe Sixpack-type who gets radicalized after jackbooted government thugs bust into his house and confiscate his guns. Turner joins a shadowy organization (imaginatively called “the Organization”) and wages war on America.

It’s a genuinely reprehensible novel, one which uses blunt racism as wallpaper. The conspirators infiltrate the “cosmopolitan racial goulash” in wigs and disguises. When the Organization eventually captures Southern California, it stages “the Day of the Rope,” hanging race traitors from trees and telephone poles across the Southland. It’s Hollywood imagery in the service of an unfilmable story.

But is it unfilmable? Cinema has a long history showing us things we don’t want to see. Just in the last ten years, audiences have championed trends both technical (3D-CGI, forays across the uncanny valley) and social (torture porn, Star Wars films that are sucky instead of fun) that would have baffled moviegoers of the 80s. Cultural goalposts only feel fixed in the moment: Lolita, Naked Lunch, and Lord Of The Rings were each considered unfilmable in their day.

Politically, what passed for far right in the 90s is basically centrist by today’s standards. Tea Partiers are a demographic, not a fringe, one that could reward a Turner film handsomely at the box office or Netflix queue. Surely, somewhere deep in the bowels of Hollywood, shadowy executives are spitballing ways to bring Macdonald’s work to the big screen.

The fact that it’s an awful idea doesn’t mean it won’t happen—it just requires certain conditions.

- Filming the Unfilmable, by Sam McPheeters, September 12, 2013.

2. Despite the regulatory efforts hustled in as a result of public panic and a political class desperate to be seen doing something, the initial problems remain, and the next crisis could be even worse. Among the major problems: risky loans to those who can’t repay them. Liberal advocacy groups such as Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), pushed lenders such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to grant loans to borrowers who couldn’t afford repayment.

The underlying problem still exists, and the new regulations are pure political theater.

“You can’t repeal the laws of supply and demand or prevent financial crisis,” says regulatory expert Donald Lamson, a partner at the law firm Shearman & Sterling. “Thus you’ll always be tempted to save large institutions to prevent pain on a large scale.” The U.S. government continues its bureaucratic empire-building, venturing down the slippery slope of regulating everything from banks and insurers to, most recently, asset managers. And who’s to say that it will stop there?

So what are the actual regulations to be imposed by the U.S. Federal Reserve on financial entities designated as systemically important and “too big to fail”? The Financial Stability Board (FSB), the international entity based in Basel, Switzerland, tasked by the leaders of G20 nations with establishing global post-crisis guidelines, is still trying to figure it out. Meanwhile, each (G20) country is supposed to diligently designate inmates for this regulatory gulag without knowing exactly what they’ll be faced with, let alone whether any proposed regulations can pass a stress test. Just as we saw with the Kyoto Protocol climate-change provisions (before the U.S. came to its senses), America has been quick off the mark to voluntarily straitjacket its home team on the global playing field.

But if there are going to be useless regulations, it’s only fair that everyone be subjected to the same uselessness — and for the public to be able to see this riveting exercise in sadism and masochism. Sadly, that’s not happening. At least the Federal Reserve’s 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program bailout process was transparently debated in Congress. That process has now been moved into the shadows.

A U.S. Treasury agency called the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), created by the Dodd-Frank Act, is tasked with designating “too big to fail” entities — choosing who’ll be subjected to inspections by government bureaucrats trying to justify their existence, plus new and still-undefined requirements related to capital, investments and liquidity. This all ensures that when the next crisis happens, the process will be so ineffectively Byzantine and unwieldy that no politician will want to take a lead role in untangling the mess.

The FSOC debates over these designations have become increasingly secretive, with the public portion of their meetings growing shorter, and any dissenting views reduced from multiple pages of argumentation in some cases to a mere few lines — even when those dissenting views belong to the individuals with the most expertise in the subject under debate.

Chairing the FSOC subcommittee responsible for selecting the entities to undergo this designation process is 33-year-old Treasury hotshot Amias Gerety, the FSOC’s deputy assistant secretary. Along with Daniel Tarullo, a committee chair at the Financial Stability Board and the Federal Reserve’s informally designated lead governor for bank regulatory purposes, Gerety emerged from Obama’s favorite think tank and talent pool: the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress.

Seemingly aware of the transparency problem, Gerety testified in writing last year to a congressional subcommittee that the FSOC had improved its website and access to council documents, and that it actively supports public collaboration. Then how about telling folks exactly how they might go about collaborating? And what about making the debates more transparent, too? What the public is keen to know is whether you folks are spitballing it — as everyone else in this Kabuki theater production seems to be doing. In fact, this whole process really belongs in Congress among accountable elected representatives.

- Transparency must accompany financial oversight, RightWingNews.com, January 29, 2014.

3. The Warriors might not lose either of their next two games against the Thunder. Their season might not end after 82 wins instead of 89.

But ... it probably will, right? It’s tough to watch any bit of Games 3 and 4, both OKC victories that were sealed in the first half, and think Golden State has anything approaching an even shot at handling its business. When Steven Adams has that much time to get his feet set in the pocket and look off your safeties, things aren’t going your way.

So, if the Warriors get dumped — and again, they probably will — the time for excuses will be upon us. Here are seven they and their fans should definitely, totally, absolutely not use.

1. Stephen Curry is hurt, probably.

There’s validity to this one. Curry looked far from himself in the last two games. Sprained MCLs don’t just go away after two weeks, and a healthy version of the MVP doesn’t have one game where he makes less than 10 shots from the field, let alone four consecutive. He was particularly abysmal in Game 4, going 6-of-20 overall and 3-of-11 from 3.

So, it makes sense that we learned on Wednesday morning, via a Curry source speaking to The Vertical, that he’s “70 percent at best.” He looks it.

Still — he’s out there. He's playing. He’s drawing defensive attention. And, most of all, he’s been great at times post-injury. A sprained knee doesn’t directly cause passes into the stands. Lots of people were spitballing a couple weeks ago about whether the Warriors could win the conference with Curry at zero percent. Seventy percent should be enough, if nothing else, to prevent this, right?

2. Draymond Green is too small....

- Warriors definitely shouldn't use any of these excuses if they lose to Thunder, SportingNews.com, May 25, 2016.

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

（作者：張欣 編輯：丹妮）