English
Noun
wet job (plural wet jobs)
- (euphemistic) A covert assassination performed by government operatives.
- 2003 Robert Young Pelton Robert Young Pelton's The World's Most Dangerous Places: 5th Edition (Robert Young Pelton the World's Most Dangerous Places), Collins, ISBN 978-0060011604, page 112
- Like the Navy SEALs (who often work in conjunction with the Delta Force), Delta Force can go anywhere, anytime; they just leave the wet jobs to SEAL Team 6-the navy's version of Delta Force.
- 2004 Gayle Lynds The Coil: A Novel, St. Martin's Press, ISBN 978-0312301446, page 53
- Being a shocked witness in Lisbon to the Carnivore's last bloody wet job
- 2006 Gayle Lynds The Last Spymaster, St. Martin's Press, ISBN 978-0312301590, page 30
- But as soon as the janitor saw Tice, he would have known he had the wrong man and should have and should have withdrawn or attempted a live capture to find out where Theosopholis was. Instead, everything about his style announced wet job. He was assigned to liquidate Tice, and maybe only Tice.
- (figuratively) A vicious attack (on someone's reputation, ideals etc.); a hatchet job.
- 2011, Jeremy Harding, "Diary", London Review of Books, 33.VII:
- The following year – the year of lawyering dangerously, at least at the LRB – saw Hitchens’s wet job on Henry Kissinger (22 October 1992). As he does with many of his subjects, he walked straight up to this one and dropped the guillotine, likening the book under review – an authorised biography – to ‘the profile of a serial murderer’.
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