Savile verb: To Savile is to publish an investigation, exposure or denunciation only after a powerful person is dead, and can neither sue nor answer back for themselves.
The term came in to collective use in October 2012, after the ITV documentary Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy Savile was broadcast on 3 October, a year after the entertainer's death.
Savil-ing as a practice however long predates this case. Perhaps the greatest Savile in history came in Moscow at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, when Khruschev denounced the crimes of Stalin. Legend has it that a voice at the back of the hall shouted to the First Secretary "and where were you when all this was going on?"
Let that stand as the approporiate respone to any Savil-ing that occurs, be it in the media or politics.
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