02.03.09

Abdicating advocacy

Posted in malapropism, verbal stupidity at 8:27 am by Bill Brohaugh

My favorite malapropism at this moment comes from a recent personal tussle with a manufacturer. Long story short: Said manufacturer’s product Did Not Work; said manufacturer offered multiple troubleshooting suggestions but declined to replace the product; yours truly fumed via both email and telephone until the customer service rep finally caved in, refusing to acknowledge that the product Did Not Work, but offering to replace it with a different model, because he was, as he phrased it so exquisitely in an email, a “customer abdicate.”

10.14.08

Wordspotting: The election coverage edition

Posted in malapropism, verbing, word misuse, wordiness at 6:32 am by Bill Brohaugh

A lot of interesting words are being bandied about in this election and the coverage thereof. And as always in such matters, people don’t seem to care about exactly what those words mean (to the point of Orwellian “War Is Peace” sorts of rhetoric on the order of “Attack Is Respect,” but that’s a different topic). Here are four examples of words we don’t see much (in two cases, I’d welcome seeing them more), with but fumbled eloquence:

  1. “The 2004 platform ran over 40,000 words, many of them turgid. It found 80 things to “applaud,” 17 to “hail,” a dozen to “commend” . . . “ Good word, turgid—meaning “inflated, bombastic, pompous.” But I submit that other than perhaps hail, the example words are not in and of themselves pompous. The writer means that many of the declarations are turgid, but words like applaud and commend are simply work-a-day words used in sentences and paragraphs and novelette-length doctrine that are the turgid culprits.
  2. The Alaska legislature voted to release the 263-page report on the “Troopergate” scandal, a state kerfuffle which has come to haunt Gov. Sarah Palin’s vice presidential bid. Here kerfuffle implies an imbroglio and/or a quagmire, when the word really means “disarray, disorder.” I try to read that sentence with the “scandal, a state disorder” in mind, but it doesn’t ring true. By the way, for those who hate nouning verbs, kerfuffle began as a verb, and for those who hate turgid words (as in its original meaning of “swollen”), kerfuffle is an intensification of the verb fuffle.
  3. Whatever recriminations the Clintons may still harbor from that long battle seem to have been nudged aside as they campaign in earnest for the Democratic ticket. “That long battle” refers to the primaries, in which, as I recall, there were no criminations—”accusations of crime or egregious acts”—and therefore no recriminations—”counter-accusations of crime or egregious acts.” I will criminate the author of that sentence as being guilty of slaughtering the language.
  4. Every politician creates a public self–with the assistance, wanted or not, of the media–and a good one is invaluable. If you make a gaffe on foreign policy but Public You is a foreign policy expert, the slip is not a story. National politicians usually have years to build these homunculi of themselves. Huh? Bacteria of themselves? E-coli politicians? Homunculitis is a disease, isn’t it? Well, of course it’s not. A homunculous is a diminutive person, and in this sense implies a miniature, an effigy, a mannikin. But sometimes vocabulary gets in its own way; rather than being communicative, homunculi brings to mind long-cured nutritional afflictions or the evil poorly dressed overlord type in Road Warrior: The Humungous. (Be advised of some criminating slaughter in the following clip, and I use clip with multiple meanings:)

08.24.08

Pig in a poke in the eye

Posted in malapropism, puns, word misuse at 8:31 am by Bill Brohaugh

“Do you want a headline for that savings-bank story?” a colleague emailed me the other day. We were working on a magazine article that employed a herd of piggy-banks as a photo illustration, and he continued, “Maybe something pig-related, like ‘A Pig on a Post’?”

“It’s ‘pig in a poke’—a poke being a type of bag,” I replied in mild correction of his idiotism—and I mean that in the nicest possible way.

Honest. I indeed used idiotism here in the nicest possible way, as a synonym of idiom. The first recorded use of idiotism was in 1588, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, preceding the word’s use as a synonym of idiocy by a hair of something’s chinny-chin-chin (first recording, 1592). And 1913’s Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, lists the “idiomatic” meaning as its primary meaning. Idiom, idiot and idiosyncracy have roots that stretch back to Greek words indicating singularity or peculiarity.

Idiotism-synonymous-with-idiom is now obsolete, but perhaps it should be revived when idiomatic cliches get mangled as they so often do these days, whether intentionally (as I suspect my colleague was doing) or unintentionally. When “toe the line” becomes “tow the line,” we are crossing the line from idiom to idiotism. So, too, when “wreaking havoc” becomes “reeking havoc” or “wrecking havoc,” or when “for all intents and purposes” becomes “for all intensive purposes.”

But perhaps the greatest idiotism is when “Pig in a poke” becomes a pig in a post—a blog post.