Open season?

Reader question:

Please explain “open season”, as in this passage:

The irony is that even known philanderers, confirmed adulterers, and certified hypocrites are having a field day criticizing Tiger Woods. All manner of people – people you normally wouldn’t leave your daughter or wife with, are all having fun at his expense. It is an open season on Tiger Woods; the time to abuse, to ridicule, to sermonize and to analyze his behavior and his entire life.

My comments:

Here, “open season” implies that the critics of Tiger Woods have been relentless. In other words, they’ve been lambasting Tiger without restraint.

This sense of relentlessness and lack of restraint is the main characteristic of an “open season”, originally referring to the season when people are allowed to hunt for foxes, bears, wolves on land or fish in water.

After a while the hunting or fishing season closes, meaning hunters will have to pull their guns and wait for next year.

Why?

To give the animals a time to recuperate, that’s why. For them to be left alone so that they may take a collective breath of relief and reproduce, multiply and hopefully regain or even grow their number. A ban on hunting for endangered animals or fish stock is pretty prevalent a practice today the world over, a sign of civilization really being civil and enlightened.

On the other hand, it has to be pointed out that humans are the very ones that have put these species to the brink of extinction in the first place.

Of course, of course.

Anyways, during the open season, one is allowed to shoot and kill however they like, hence the figurative connotations we infer that when people have an open season on Tiger the fallen golfer, they attack him relentlessly and without restraint.

Alright, here are two more examples to help you master this phrase – to have an open season on something or someone:

1. Industry experts warn that lobsters will soon disappear from the nation’s menus if over-fishing is allowed to continue to push South African stocks towards extinction.

The recent extension of rights to subsistence fishers has created an “open season” on West Coast rock lobsters, also known as crayfish, which is being exploited by Chinese triads and has reduced the shellfish stocks to a level lower than those of abalone, they said.

The collapse of the lobster fishing industry would mean the end of an industry that supports more than 4,300 jobs and is worth an estimated R347-million.

“Lobster stock is about 3% of pristine, which is the level needed to sustain fishing. They are biologically worse off than abalone, which is at 8%,” said Shaheen Moolla, the former head of Marine and Coastal Management (MCM).

The devastation started in 2007, he said, after former environmental affairs minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk announced “interim measures” to grant subsistence fishing rights for lobsters, which are easily accessible inside the 200m-depth shallows along the West Coast to East London.

Quotas for lobsters and linefish were given to 1,500 subsistence fishers, who became known as “interim relief” fishers. A challenge to the allocation by the West Coast Rock Lobster Association was rejected by the Supreme Court of Appeal in September last year.

Moolla said this week that the interim relief fishers were allocated 200 tonnes of lobsters for the 2010-11 season. “In the Elandsbaai area alone they have already harvested at least 500 tonnes, with more than half the season left. In Paternoster they are removing 30,000 lobster tails a day. If poaching levels are even half that in other zones, we are probably looking at the interim relief sector taking about 1 500 to 2 000 tonnes,” he said.

A recreational fisher who did not want to be named said he had witnessed interim relief fishers taking out “crayfish tails by the sackful and throwing the rest of the carcasses away. It’s tragic to see what’s happening. It’s open season on crayfish.”

- Fishing experts put red alert on lobsters, MG.co.za, February 18, 2011.

2. The Egyptian government government’s lackluster response to deadly attacks against Christians is tantamount to telling Muslim fanatics it’s “open season” on Christians, Middle East expert Ken Timmerman tells Newsmax.TV. More attacks are inevitable unless the government and religious leaders crack down on the terrorists, says the best-selling author.

Timmerman, a Newsmax contributor, was commenting on recent violence against Christians in Egypt, including an assault this week on a train headed to Cairo that killed one Christian and wounded five others and the bombing of a Coptic Christian church that killed 21 people. The New Year’s Day bombing led to rioting.

“I’m very worried about what’s happening in Egypt, also Pakistan, Iran as well as Iraq,” Timmerman said. “When Hosni Mubarak, the president of Egypt, pulled back his ambassador on the 11th of January from the Vatican, this was a very dangerous symbol. He was essentially telling Muslim fanatics in Egypt that it was an open season on Christians.

“The pope had criticized the actions both of the Egyptian government in failing to restrain Muslims in Egypt and Muslim leaders themselves for failing to exercise control or influence over their faithful. So these attacks on Christians I’m afraid are going to multiply in Egypt unless the Egyptian government cracks down and makes it very, very clear that this is not tolerated behavior inside their country.”

- Timmerman: Egypt Gives Muslim Fanatics ‘Open Season’ on Christians, NewsMax.com, January 13, 2011.

About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.