Changes the English language has undergone in the past fascinate me. But changes it may be going through now? Those just look like annoying mistakes.
Take this example from a recent CNN story about the prevalence of misinformation: “Over on X … hate speech and violent threats are now fair game.” The rest of the sentence (which I won’t quote here because it is too ungrammatical for polite company) adds the fact that when Elon Musk acquired what was then called Twitter in 2022, he “promptly gutted its moderation efforts.”
In other words, on X, hate speech and threats are now acceptable tactics—behavior that’s fair under the rules of the game. But that’s not what fair game means.
The term fair game, meaning “someone or something that can be chased, attacked, or criticized,” comes from hunting—game (sense 4) being “animals under pursuit or taken in hunting.” Merriam-Webster offers the example, “Celebrities are fair game for the tabloids”; that is, they’re a permissible target.
Fortunately, correct uses of the term are still plentiful. For example, Microsoft’s AI Chief Says Your Content Is Fair Game If It’s on the Open Web. According to “Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Google’s DeepMind AI unit and now CEO of AI at Microsoft, … it’s fine for AI companies to scour every corner of the open web—which is, arguably, anything on any website that’s not protected behind a paywall or login interface—and to use what they find to train their algorithms.”
To AI, the hunt is always on, and the internet is made of delicious rabbits and game hens, copyright be damned.
Similarly, “YouTube Confirms Your Pause Screen Is Now Fair Game for Ads.” Great.
But a little Googling also reveals plenty of misuses of fair game.
“In SCOTUS Moore Case, Taxation without Receipt of Cash Is Fair Game,” reads one Tax Policy Center headline. The case, Moore v. United States, questioned whether income has to be received, or realized, before the government can tax it—that is (to use the term correctly), whether unrealized income is fair game for taxation.1
When the nonprofit State Fair of Texas wanted to ban guns on the site it leases from the city of Dallas, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the fair and the city, arguing that “state law … bars local governments from restricting firearms on land they own or lease.” (Of course it does.) State fair officials countered that “the city has nothing to do with how the nonprofit operates the event and played no role in this year’s gun ban—thus making the policy fair game.”
The state fair’s gun ban is an acceptable tactic, not a permissible target. This example, like the X story, makes me suspect that fair game is getting mistaken for fair play.
According to the Phrase Finder website, “‘Fair play’ is the properly conducted conditions for a game, giving all participants an equal chance.” Is the “play” sense of game causing interference with the word play?
Just as likely, I think, is that the writers using fair game to mean something closer to fair play really just mean fair. (On X, hate speech is considered fair. Taxation of unrealized income might be ruled fair.) Certain words get stuck together like Legos, so that what could once be described simply as fair now has to be fair game (or fair play).
This Lego effect may be another symptom of some writers’ lack of trust in the language. When a word isn’t trusted to stand alone and do its job, it’s attached to another word, assigned a buddy, as though it were a third-grader in a fire drill.
One of the most infuriating cases of this phenomenon is the increasing tendency, especially in the news, to describe every change as a “sea change.” (Don’t get me started.)2
The misuses of fair game might be isolated mistakes and not signs of a permanent shift in the term’s meaning. Or this might be a case of actual language evolution. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
For more on this lovely and much-misused Shakespearean phrase, see Phrase Finder’s entry on “sea change.”