Go in the Tank for Somebody

in the tank
Also found in: Dictionary, Financial.
in the tank
1. Plummeting, as of prices.
Housing prices around here are in the tank right now, so I doubt we'll get the price that we want if we sell.
2. Available for use.
I always keep an extra box of cereal in the tank for the kids.
If you don't eat well before the game, you won't have enough energy in the tank to play well.
3. Very much in favor of someone or something.
I'm not in the tank for anyone, I swear—I'm completely neutral!

See also: tank
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms. © 2024 Farlex, Inc, all rights reserved.
in the ;tank (American English, informal, business) (about the price of shares, bonds, etc.) falling quickly: Technology stocks are doing well, but everything else is in the tank.
See also: tank
Farlex Partner Idioms Dictionary © Farlex 2017
in the tank
1. In reserve: a runner who didn't have enough in the tank to hold the lead.
2. In a state of decline or failure: Stocks have been in the tank for months.
3. Enthusiastically partial; strongly favoring: a reporter accused of being in the tank for a candidate.
See also: tank
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
See also:
cutthroat prices
go sky-high
fall through the floor
day by day
force a/the/(something's) price up
drive a price up
drive a/the/(something's) price up
discount
at a discount
haggle with (one) over (something)






EXPLAINER
Explainer Goes in the Tank
An unbiased etymology.
BY JULIET LAPIDOS
OCT 24, 2008

COMMENT
A new study on media coverage of the presidential race suggests “that the press is in the tank for Barack Obama,” the Boston Globe reported yesterday. Is a “top medical journal in the tank for Obama?” reads a recent Portfolio headline. John McCain, according to a story in Thursday’s Guardian, “didn’t even give the press a chance, trashing it on the assumption that it would be in the tank for Obama.” How did in the tank come to mean supportive (when you really ought to be impartial)?

Aquatics by way of pugilism. In the 19th century, Americans called swimming pools “tanks” and thus “go into the tank” was synonymous with “to dive.” As far back as the 1920s, the phrase go into the tank became associated with intentionally losing a boxing match by diving onto the canvas and pretending you’ve been knocked out—a sense perfectly illustrated by this sentence from a 1928 New York Times article: “Pansy came out of jail and his manager, thinking him ‘all washed up,’ signed him up to ‘take a dive,’ or, more technically, ‘to go into the tank’ for a bird named Sailor Gray.” (For more on the pugilistic origins of into the tank, see William Safire’s April column on the subject.)

and how you define this project of taking seriously the intentions and the actual language


By the mid-20th century, go into the tank, in the sense of rolling over for someone in a rigged contest, extended into political usage. Thus in 1960, syndicated columnist Bob Ruark set up a boxing metaphor to describe the run-up to that year’s presidential conventions: “I am having a tiny touch of difficulty with the American news lately, having gotten it slightly mixed up with the prize-fighting business. But if I read it right, the presidential nomination conventions have been bagged in advance … with all the other competitors rigged to go into the tank for Jolting Jack Kennedy and Richard the Ripper Nixon.”

While taking a dive still refers to self-sabotage, the meaning of go into the tank gradually shifted toward working on someone’s behalf, often with the hint of backroom deals or at least inappropriate devotion. As such, people weren’t as likely to go into the tank as they were to be found there after the fact; i.e., they’d simply be in the tank. In a 1987 Boston Globe article by David Nyhan on the Robert Bork nomination process, we get: “Will he be in the tank for Reagan? Ted Kennedy says yes, Bork says no. I’m afraid Bork hasn’t convinced me.” And, also from the Globe’s David Nyhan, a 1983 example of the phrase applied to a journalist: “It turns out [George] Will coached Reagan in debate, privately advised him on issues, regularly praised his presidency in print and on TV, and only rarely uttered the bare minimum of criticism that decency and appearance require. As a result of the recent commotion, Will bears the Scarlet Letter of having been in the tank for Reagan.”

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Explainer thanks Grant Barrett of the American Dialect Society and Ben Zimmer of the Visual Thesaurus.