There are laws protecting whistleblowers, and both government and corporate policies of “see something, say something.” And once in a while a whistleblower is celebrated as a hero, like when Upton Sinclair exposed the unsavory practices of the meatpacking industry in The Jungle in 1906, though five publishers rejected the book because it was too negative, plus, nobody likes a whistleblower.Īnd that’s the problem: whistleblowing may lead to beneficial change, but it’s also true that nobody likes a whistleblower. The lawyers want the definers of English to replace negative synonyms like betrayer, fink, and snitch with uplifting ones like watchdog, truthteller, and fraud-buster. All these negatives “mean fewer people coming forward to protect us when they see something wrong.” And that, in turn, means fewer whistleblowers fired, disciplined, or fleeing to Russia, which equals fewer clients for the firm. Yet that old school-yard mentality of “nobody likes a snitch” persists. Histleblowers are increasingly stepping forward on behalf of the public good. A law firm that specializes in defending whistleblowers has started a petition on to persuade dictionaries and thesauruses to ditch their derogatory synonyms for whistleblower in favor of positive terms:
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