Sometimes it’s best to say what you mean when claiming that someone didn’t mean what he said. Reacting to criticism of John McCain’s recent assertion that the fundamentals of our economy are strong, Sarah Palin told Fox “News”:
It was an unfair attack on the verbiage that Sen. McCain chose to use because the fundamentals, as he was having to explain afterwards, he means our work force, he means the ingenuity of the American people. And of course, that is strong and that is the foundation of our economy.
Palin used the word verbiage to mean “wording” or “phrasing,” and dictionaries do allow that such meanings might apply. But the first meaning, and very much a prevalent and powerful meaning, of verbiage is (and I’ll leave it to the apolitical—I think—Oxford English Dictionary: “Wording of a superabundant or superfluous character, abundance of words without necessity or without much meaning; excessive wordiness.” Myself, I remember the meaning by pretending that verbiage is a contraction of “verbal garbage.”
So, is it unfair for me to attack Palin’s easily misinterpreted use of verbiage (just because that’s what the word usually means)? If so, consider me unfair. One would think that people in the public eye might give a bit more concentration on carefully choosing their verbiage when defending another’s verbiage.
The McCain campaign has become a political persnickitor—a shocked-a-minute bewailer of language abuse, fueled with a creative cynicism that would make Lewis Carroll proud. Oh you bad English speaker! You are a sexist by using the phrase “lipstick on a pig”! And like many shocked persnickitors, McCain is wrong. McCain’s forehead vein is publically popping because of something Barack Obama said:
“John McCain says he’s about change too, and so I guess his whole angle is, ‘Watch out George Bush — except for economic policy, health care policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy and Karl Rove-style politics — we’re really going to shake things up in Washington,’” he said. “That’s not change. That’s just calling something the same thing something different. You know you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig. You know you can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change, it’s still going to stink after eight years. We’ve had enough of the same old thing.”
And, welllllllllll OF COURSE, the aforementioned pig must be Sarah Palin, because, after all, there are no male pigs. But Obama has not mentioned her. Obama has not even applied the phrase to a human being. He’s applied it to an activity, which is how this phrase is used most often. I contend that the sexist is the McCain campaign, who hears the word pig and automatically assumes (or, certainly more accurately, pretends to assume) that the pig is Palin. In that way, they are revealing themselves as the sexists.
That’s looking at the issue from the standpoint of political nonsense. Now let’s look at it from language nonsense. “Putting lipstick on a pig” has been around for decades, an idiom communicating the futuile attempt to put a pretty face on an ugly situation. This is known, professional political persnickitors, as analogy. The McCain campaign obviously doesn’t care about the phrase’s history, use, or intent—even though Mr. McCain has apparently used the phrase himself. Mr. Carroll wrote about words and not phrases in the following, but I believe it applies.
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,’ it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master – that’s all.’
When one wants to be master (in this case, of the most powerful nation of the world), willing to twist situations by injecting his politically expedient meanings and implications into observations he doesn’t want to hear and meanings into established English phrases he doesn’t want to respect . . . well, there’s that wall that Humpty sat on. For a while.
McCain’s attempts to manipulate language is putting pig on a lipstick.
Rollover Beethoven and tell Tchaikovski the news: Stop putting spaces in verb phrases. Such as demonstrated in this email I just received:
Now, many English-speakers would write that as “Roll over your 401(k),” but I fear that such speakers are becoming increasingly rare. The practice of compounding verb phrases is continuing to pick up. Or pickup.
Don’t get me wrong. I find nothing wrong with compounding. I tend to accept and generate compound words more quickly than others. I write website when others still prefer web site. And in my more lyrical fiction endeavors, I’ve written of, for example, “moonshards” to describe scattered light within a forest.
And there’s nothing wrong with language change—as long as it fills a void or brings additional communicative flexibility . . . and doesn’t confuse, introduce grammatical nonsense, or just plain ol’ sound stupid:
Confusion: To embellish my previous smartass example, consider “Pickup the truck.” Versus “Pick up the truck.”
Introducing grammatical nonsense: Consider an instruction you wouldn’t be shocked to see nowadays on a web page (and I believe lax website instruction-writing is at the root of much of this odd compounding): “To get started to rollover your 401(k), signup and login.” On the surface such construction seems clear. “Rollover your 401(k)” sounds nearly identical to “Roll over your 401(k)” (nearly, and more on that in a moment). But how do I express the fact that I am now acting on that instruction? “I am rolling over” or “I am rollovering”? Past tense: “I rolled over” or “I rollovered”?
Bonus item: Failing to mirror spoken sound. Say “The rollover is dead” aloud, and then say “Roll over and play dead.” Compare the compact (more concrete?) noun versus the flowing, more fluid verb phrase. Form and content.
Sounding stupid: Well, I always do that. But let’s return to our first example. “To get started to rollover your 401(k), signup and login.” Why not “To getstarted,” as long as we’re at it?
Or, for that matter, why not “whynot”?. And with that, I’ll stopit and shutup now.
(Musical side note: “Roll Over Beethoven” to me is like “On Broadway”—a fabulous, core rock and roll song of which there is no definitive version. That said, I deeply love the Electric Light Orchestra rendition. Check out the video below for that version, additionally delightful because Richard Pryor introduces the song, and YouTube—compound word and all—does indeed call it “Roll Over.”)
When I came out of grad school I landed a literary internship at the infamous Joseph Papp Public Theater in NYC and I had the fortune of co-dramaturging Don Cheadle’s play GROOMED.
Infamous? Has this renowned theater gone bad? Perhaps there were student’s there:
As has been pointed out, maybe this is correct, after all—maybe it’s simply a contraction of singular “student is.”
Or perhaps the theater is infamous because the actor’s, intern’s and student’s are dodging golf balls. Here’s a note from infamous JohnnyB, regarding a newspaper article about a school next door to a driving range:
I found this quote interesting.
So far no children have been hit by errant golf balls, although some have flown over the playground and a few cars have been hit.
Flying children would seem to be more noteworthy than flying golf balls, but that’s just my opinion.
“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.
The following represents why I love words, and why I love true word people:
Nancy over at the Fritinancy blog snarked yesterday about a recent press release using the phrase “plutonic relationships” when more than a few of us know that the subject was actually “platonic relationships.”
Nancy’s sharp introduction to the malapropism was . . .
If Men Are from Mars … and women are from Venus, are some relationships from Pluto?
Evidently many people wish to hook up with someone who looks like a cartoon dog, or possibly someone who is small and icy, with an eccentric orbit, who thinks they’re a planetary celestial body, but really aren’t.
The thesis expressed in [Nancy's] quotation from Blubet, with its reference to “a hidden sexual desire or chemistry that secretly sparks between them,” actually resonates rather nicely with the OED’s definition of the geological sense of the word ‘plutonic’: “Pertaining to or involving the action of intense heat at great depths upon the rocks forming the earth’s crust; igneous.”
Ensuing comment from yours truly who non-humbly had to jump into the fray, herein semi-humbly presented:
Further to Q. Pheevr’s point, I suspect that “plutonic” relationships may actually source back to “plutonium” and not “pluto” (neither former planet nor dog). My evidence is that like plutonium, platonic relationships have half lives.
All this can be summed up as a matter of preference in these matters of love, of course: You say pla-tato, I say plu-tuto; let’s call the whole thing off.
From the mostly “I-must-keep-writing-or-I’ll-die-like-a-nonswimming-shark” school of internet campaign coverage in an AP story posted early 8/6/08:
Bayh opened his introduction of Obama by saying he had some “good news” to depart. “In five short months, the Bush administration will be done,” Bayh said.
That use of depart to discuss pending administration departure when impart was obviously intended was a delicious match not of form and content but of misinform and discontent.
Some editorial type apparently speared the shark, though. Later that day, the article was revised because of developments and, possibly, because of editorial second thoughts. The phrase “to depart” had itself departed, eliminating the malapropism and imparting concision.
Fulsome does not mean “full.” Nor does it mean “complete, well developed” or other pleasing synonyms of abundance. On the contrary, the adjective is used not in a compliment, but in an insult, meaning “excessive.” Its frequent use in “fulsome praise” gives that phrase the meaning of “cloying, unctuous, obsequious flattery.”
Though loosey-goosey usagists may accept the turning of the word’s meaning on its head, most of us draw the line at such surrender to error.
That might depend on who “us” is, I suppose. Woe Is I authors Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman wrote last year that “the word ‘fulsome’ has been misused so much lately that it may be beyond saving.” One might make a case that “misused so much” (a negative perspective) might be synonymous with “becoming common use” (a neutral or potentially positive perspective), a perspective shift as egregious as allowing fulsome to soften from negative to neutral, I suppose.
Now, I wonder if any language observers in the 1300s and later years were worried about fulsome being “misused so much” when the word first started changing meaning . . . from its original sense of, simply, “full, abundant, plentiful”—the very meaning that persnickitors decry today. That meaning was recorded around the middle of the 1200s (which, I acknowledge, O’Conner and Kellerman themselves note). The word later (oh, those loosey-goosey usagists, turning the word’s meaning on its head!) took meanings of “too full,” and eventually “obnoxiously full.”
So the word history I originally sought to offer my fulsome praise was the history of fulsome itself, of course. And I agree: my use of a shifting word meaning was indeed egregious, in that the first recorded use of egregious, the Oxford English Dictionary tells me, was in the sense of “remarkably good.”
Though the advice seems oxymoronic in the light of its Write Tight context, I regularly tell writers that longer can be shorter (and, yes, “more is less,” more or less). Longer phrasings and sentences can make for shorter reading—when additional length brings clarification, background or context. Here’s a couple of examples of short-as-ridiculously-long from recent radio news items I heard:
“People with hepatitis A fears . . .” When I first heard that, I pictured diseased people, people with hepatitis A, fearing ungrammatically. Quickly enough (in terms of my brain, anyway), it clicked in that fears was a noun instead of a numerically inconsistent verb. Longer, but mentally shorter, would have been “People who fear hepatitis A . . . ”
“A pit bull was put down after biting an 8 and 9 year old.” Wow—a kid who’s simultaneously 8 and 9. He’s not 8 going on 9. He’s both! Of course, we’re really talking about the pit bull biting “an 8-year-old and a 9-year-old,” two youngsters whose unfortunate circumstance is brought to life by investing in just a couple of extra words.
Turning on my car radio on the way home from work one day, I fortuitously overheard this casino advertisement:
And if you’re fortuitous, you will win the grand prize!
Well, yes and no. Yes, in that fortuitous means “by chance,” and winning any prize at a casino damn well better by chance or the gaming regulators will soon be swarming in. But losing out on the grand prize is also fortuitous, as losing in a casino is, once again, a matter of chance.
So, no in that it’s almost impossible for a person to be fortuitous in its proper definition, except perhaps at conception when, by chance, it could have been one sperm over and therefore, no you. Events are often fortuitous—they are often matters of chance.
What the ad means, of course, is that if you’re fortunate, you’ll win that prize. Fortunate implies good fortune in its core meaning, and here the adjective can indeed be applied to people, the recipients of positive fortuitous events.
On the other hand, I will defend the casino ad even though I don’t forgive it. Ask ten people what fortuitous means, and if you get “accidental, or involving chance with no implication of positive or negative outcome” as the thrust of more than one response, I’d be shocked. And when is the next time you’ll speak of a “fortuitous car accident”? Fortuitous as a synonym of fortunate is mistake-by-association, but mistake-by-association has led to any number of evolving words and word meanings in English. And the elevated resonance of the word (abetted by its extra syllable) seems to be used to intensify the good fortune. It’s really really good fortune! It’s fortuitous! So, in that sense, it carries its own unique meaning. Still, this defense doesn’t mean that I cheer this shift in meaning.
Meantime, I will return to the good fortune (fortunes can also be good, bad or indifferent) of happening to hear that radio commercial. “How fortuitous!” I didn’t exclaim. “I need a subject for today’s post . . .”
authors Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman 
context, I regularly tell writers that longer can be shorter (and, yes, “more is less,” more or less). Longer phrasings and sentences can make for shorter reading—when additional length brings clarification, background or context. Here’s a couple of examples of short-as-ridiculously-long from recent radio news items I heard:
, 
and 
