Talk:slow roll

Confusion with “slow-walking”

When researching (deprecated template usage) slow-walk, I found this article:

• “Faced with Obama ‘slow walking’ document requests, GOP aims at outside groups”, April 19th, 2011

which contains the quote:

“There is a coordinated effort, I assume being led by the White House, to, I would describe it as slow walking or slow rolling these things,” says an investigator on the Energy and Commerce Committee, “No one’s told us ‘no, we’re not gonna do that.’ They say they’ll do it every time. But they’re doing as much as they can to stall.”

The quoted speaker is confusing the technical poker term slow rolling (acting slowly when one holds a strong or winning hand, esp. on reveal) and the term slow-walk (“delay, stall, drag one’s feet”), possibly because in this context it is related to revealing documents.

I haven’t heard “slow roll” used in this sense (“delay”), but I’m flagging it here in case it gains currency, and for the reader’s interest.

—Nils von Barth (nbarth) (talk) 06:59, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Expanding the reference to include non-poker related usages/meanings

I was looking for a way to understand slow-roll in this context: "The civil servants will trudge on. They know how to slow-roll people whose ideas they deem unworkable," added a former National Security Council official. "That’s what the bureaucracy does. You’ll see quite a bit of that when Trump comes in."

From: Trump makes intel community queasy, retrieved August 18, 2016

-Iletras (talk) 11:59, 18 August 2016 (UTC)

You have found an instance of use that suggests "slow roll" has a meaning like "slow walk". Nils Barth above views this as confusion, but confusion is also a process by which meanings get added to terms. If you would find two other similar instance of use in, for example, Google News or Google Books (which refer to "durably archived sources"), we could with some confidence add a definition like "slow walk". DCDuring TALK 12:50, 18 August 2016 (UTC)