But there is a lesser-known, far more unsettling sibling in the idiom family:
Or think of the Nuremberg Trials (1945-46). The Allied powers could have simply shot the Nazi leadership. Instead, they used the long tongue of the law: months of testimony, documents read aloud, and a final judgment that called the Holocaust "the most horrible crime in human history." The tongue labeled them, shamed them, and wrote their infamy into eternity. Of course, the long tongue is not infallible. Sometimes it stutters. Sometimes it is bribed into silence.
And it burns.