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snitch line
DCHP-2 (Jul 2016)
n. — informal, derogatory
a telephone hotline that a person can call to report another person's rule-breaking or crimes.
Type: 5. Frequency — The term is currently most prevalent in Canada (see Chart 1). It seems to have had currency in the US, as newspaper quotations from the late 1970s suggest. Given the current low frequency of the term in the US in Chart 1, the term is possibly also a Canadian preservation from American English.
See also COD-2, s.v. "snitch line", which is marked "esp. Cdn".
See also COD-2, s.v. "snitch line", which is marked "esp. Cdn".
Quotations
1992
Metro's welfare workers have been bombarded with complaints from residents who have phoned a "snitch line" to report people they think are welfare cheats.
2000
Can you believe, to fuel this smoke screen, we are spending taxpayers' money to maintain a snitch line for all the tattletales who want to phone in.
2012
City garbage collectors sneaking animal dung into the trash for a fee, workers walking off with gift cards, and a moonlighting employee so aggrieved at being caught that he had to be suspended - all were busted last year by the city snitch line that goes directly to Ottawa's auditor general Alain Lalonde.
The "fraud and waste hotline" was installed in 2005 so that the public and city workers themselves could report nefarious goings-on within the City Hall bureaucracy and among front-line workers.
2015
I think Harper's big mistake was in taking discontent with the niqab for permission to go big on all culturally-rooted misogynist practices. His proposal for a tip line to report "barbaric cultural practices" like forced marriages to the RCMP was overkill, and struck a sour note, even amongst those Canadians -- like me -- who were his staunchest supporters for a face-cover ban.
[...]
The result was that people who quite defensibly resist face cover in the citizenship ceremony or in the giving and getting of public services now found themselves in the highly uncomfortable position of seeming to endorse Stasi-era tactics of social control. No strategy is more calculated to bring out racist mischief-makers and vengeful false allegers than a snitch line. No policy is more likely to make entire communities feel singled out as inherently suspicious than a snitch line. And no policy is more likely to make the party that proposes it look imperious, bullying and nativist.
[...]
The result was that people who quite defensibly resist face cover in the citizenship ceremony or in the giving and getting of public services now found themselves in the highly uncomfortable position of seeming to endorse Stasi-era tactics of social control. No strategy is more calculated to bring out racist mischief-makers and vengeful false allegers than a snitch line. No policy is more likely to make entire communities feel singled out as inherently suspicious than a snitch line. And no policy is more likely to make the party that proposes it look imperious, bullying and nativist.
References
- COD-2
Images
