#1167 Ratting Out

I was listening to the radio the other day and the news was on. The newscaster was talking about some criminal who attacked another criminal in prison because the first one thought the second one had provided evidence against him.
The newscaster didn’t put it that way, as you would expect a newscaster to do. He said the first criminal thought the guy who he beat up had “ratted him out.”
Ratted him out. As in “ratted on him.” It always seems to come back to rats when we talk betrayal.
It's not like we don't have other interesting language for people that turn other people in. The first negative word we learn for this is tattletale.
It’s funny in a way. The supposed beneficiaries of tattletales are you and I. Society gains when one person exposes another person’s crime. And yet it is far more natural for all of us to fall into the sneering lingo of the compromised criminal who’s caught by that information. They are ratted out by rats.
And we look down our own whiskered noses at the tattletale.
Perhaps it’s because we also fear getting caught for the little wrongdoings we ourselves do. Or worse, we have this picture of people turning in Jews in Nazi Germany or democratic dreamers in oppressive regimes like Iran. Strange, since the ordinary anti-criminal rat is actually helping our democratic society prosper.
Still, we’ve come up with some cool names. There was and is “stool pigeon” or “stoolie.” There’s “squealer” and “informer” and the once useful “snitch,” which now has degenerated to a ball-like thing in a game played by non-muggles.
My favorite, and one we haven’t heard for a while, is “fink.” For a while fink was synonymous with “narc,” even for non-drug related snitching. But narc never really caught on. Fink resonated. It could be used as both a noun and a verb, a true mark of cultural depth. People would fink on someone else. “Man, he finked on me to the teacher.” Or just be one. “That guy is such a fink...”
There was even a song I remember. “He was a fink. He was a ratfink...”
When it comes to betrayal, we can always depend on the rat part.
America, ya gotta love it.