damage control

damage control

The efforts made to reduce, negate, or counteract damage, loss, or any other unfavorable outcome. The IT department was on serious damage control after it became apparent that our servers had been hacked. The senator has been doing damage control ever since he let slip racist remarks during a television interview.
See also: control, damage
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

damage control

Measures to minimize or curtail loss or harm. For example, As soon as they discovered the leak to the press, the senator's office worked night and day on damage control . Used literally since the 1950s, specifically for limiting the effect of an accident on a ship, this term began to be used figuratively in the 1970s.
See also: control, damage
The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer.
See also:
  • the damage
  • hail damage
  • stop the bleeding
  • play Old Harry with (something)
  • come to no harm
  • cut a swath through (something)
  • cut a swathe through
  • cut a swathe through something
  • come to harm
  • closing the stable door after the horse has bolted
References in periodicals archive
The age of patients undergoing damage control surgery is a significant mortality prediction variable, owing to the fact that physiological reserves diminish with age.
Damage control resuscitation: the need for specific blood products to treat the coagulopathy of trauma.
Damage control: Furtado was the first to fess up, writing on Twitter on Monday: "In 2007, I received $1million from the Gadhafi clan to perform a 45 min.
The future direction for combat damage control resuscitation will likely include synthetic hemoglobin as a replacement for pRBCs, especially in far forward environments.
Authors Dezenhall and Weber should be saluted for writing clearly and directly about damage control, a subject often dimmed by obfuscation.
Surely seeing the damage control that the United Church of Canada is trying to do would give them a hint.
"We can continue to live by damage control, or we can change the way we play the game," he says.
Your BFF is on the level if she wants to help you do damage control. She ought to be willing to make an effort to stop the secret from spinning even further out of control.
Depending upon how high-profile the client is, you also may have to do damage control. If other clients get wind of the fact that your business has lost a high-profile customer, they may consider jumping ship, too.
Brothers, pointing out what abortion means for the baby, and giving a 7-step action plan for damage control, starting with "Cancel Clinton immediately," and ending with "if you are not sorry, resign."
Presidential commissions & national security; the politics of damage control.
Damage Control: How To Stop Making Jesus Look Bad by Dean Merrill offers an intriguing interpretation of societal perspectives which so frequently render Christ in poor view and how Christians might assist as His earthly ambassadors to improve His image and redeem His position with respect to the broader world.
Indeed, over the past four years or so, DiLorenzo and The Real Lincoln have stirred up a hornet's nest of frothing, apoplectic liberals and neo-conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, as they vainly attempt damage control of the bleeding myth of Lincoln, the "Redeemer President."
What else can an employer do to prevent wrongful termination or discrimination lawsuits (or do damage control)?
Vanity Fair writer James Wolcott rightly took them to task for this callous and clumsy attempt at damage control. Then he immediately turned to a numbers game of his own: Whatever the eventual death toll from Katrina, he asserted, it would take away the World Trade Center bombing from the right as a propaganda tool in the War on Terror because conservatives would no longer be able to "ritualistically invoke the '3,000 dead' to the same sonorous effect." One has to wonder if a body count below 1,000 would have been a disappointment.