How are you enjoying dealing with the bureaucrats who run our lives these days? (I heard your answer, and you shouldn’t really use that sort of language!) Hence you will appreciate this American slang word for a completely useless public servant. Such a person is called a ‘Throttlebottom’. Here’s how the Merriam-Webster defines a Throttlebottom: ‘an inept and futile person in public office’. When Lyndon Johnson was elected vice president he’s reported to have said, ‘I will not be a “Throttlebottom”.’ It’s a distinctively American word because it was born on Broadway. The word comes from the name of a character in a musical comedy – Alexander Throttlebottom in the Broadway show Of Thee I Sing which opened on the great white way in 1932. The words and music were by George and Ira Gershwin, and the ‘book’ of the show (the story and the dialogue) was by George Kaufman and Morris Ryskind – so presumably it was Kaufman and Ryskind who gave this character his unfortunate, if memorable, name. Ryskind also wrote a number of the Marx Brothers movies, and in those scripts he coined some memorable names (remember Groucho as Rufus T. Firefly?). So I suspect Throttlebottom came from the fertile (if twisted) mind of Morrie Ryskind. Next time you are dealing with one of these clowns, you can mutter quietly to yourself, ‘I’m stuck with a Throttlebottom!’