The bad news: The Saurus Rex is no more.
The good news: it's probably going to be a book I'm calling, Doctor Diction's Guide to Rhetorical Bullsh*t
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Monday, August 1, 2011
Somebody's Been Reading The Thinker's Thesaurus
Have you ever listened to someone use a fancy word, only to hear them follow it up with its less fancy synonym? It’s as if they mean to say, “I know this word, but you probably don’t, so allow me to translate for you.” I’ve thought about this annoying maneuver, and I've come up with a name for it. I call it, “being incredibly condescending,” or better yet, “being a transliterationist."
You have to feel for the transliterationists. They have no choice but to transliterate, because if they didn’t, no one would know what they were talking about. Recently on ABC’s This Week with Christiane Amanpour, this ridiculous rhetorical no-no found new expression. At the moment when Amanpour uttered the words, “He (Benjamin Franklin) was amazingly perspicacious…” up popped an on-screen graphic of the word’s definition!
Today's Lesson: If you feel the need to define a word, don't use it , no matter how much you want everyone to know how perspicacious -- smart -- you are.
Monday, July 25, 2011
If You Will? Um, No, I Won't.
You hear it all the time, this pretentious expression “if you will,” commonly appended to a poorly spoken word or phrase. TV journalists love this little trick, because they think it compensates for their poorly spoken ways. It doesn't.
Monday, July 18, 2011
Talk Like an Egyptian
Let’s say you’re the Egyptian Minister of Antiquities for the Mubarak regime, and you’re a semi-shameless self-promoter, and you’re worried about job security -- what with all those annoying molotov cocktails flying by your office window. You’ve just garnered a prestigious award, Peru’s Order of the Sun prize, and so you need to brag about it on your blog. You can’t just say what you mean – “Hey everybody look what I just got!” So instead you couch your achievement in the disingenuous and the trite:
“I was deeply honored to receive the prestigious “Order of the Sun” award from the people of Peru. It truly was a memorable occasion and one I shall always treasure.”
Today’s Lesson: Don’t do that.
Monday, July 11, 2011
Arnold Zwicky's Recency Illusion
Sounds pretty impressive, right? “Recency illusion” – no doubt some profound phenomenon discovered by some noted intellectual. But in fact, this is a classic example of what we like to call thesaurisizing – the practice of using a more academic word to cast what you’re doing as being grounded in actual science, or as being more impressive than it really is. Shampoo purveyors are particularly inclined to this kind of ruse. Panteen with Pro V 5 hydrates -- whatever that means. You get the picture.
So let’s say you’re a linguist, and throughout the course of your career you are occasionally surprised to find that some words have been around for longer than you might have thunk – like the word “pretty” dating back to Shakespeare. Evidently, according to Professor Arnold Zwiki of Ohio State University, that’s "recency illusion" – or for you English speakers out there --recentness illusion. And, according to his Wiki page, the term is by no means consigned to the field of linguistics. So if your kid loves "Pretty Woman" by Van Halen, but doesn’t know Roy Orbison did it years earlier, according to Professor Zwicky, your kid suffers from a nasty case of recency illusion. I just think the kid would be ignorant of music history, but what do I know; I’m not a scientist like Zwicky.
It’s telling that Zwicky would take a common ordinary thing like ignorance of history, and shamelessly attempt to coin it. It seems to me that the practice of coining should only be allowed for things that are newly discovered or rarely known. By applying Zwicky’s liberal standard, I could presumably coin a term for when you see a word you think is French, but is not, (Gallicus illusion), or when you see a word you think is spelled correctly, but is not, (spellification illusion), or for the moment you realize that the expression “whatup dog” can be found in Shakespeare's 12th Night: “antediluvian realization?”
Anywho, as Zwicky’s Wiki page would have it, this term seems to be his chief claim to fame. What’s really surprising is that his peers afford him such a wide berth on this. I suppose when you are the “Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Ohio State University,” your peers tend to be awfully forgiving of your accomplishments -- although it’s hard to find too many souls brave enough to publicly tout the brilliance of this particular discovery. Me thinks most of them just avert their eyes, and let Zwicky have his illusion.
So let’s say you’re a linguist, and throughout the course of your career you are occasionally surprised to find that some words have been around for longer than you might have thunk – like the word “pretty” dating back to Shakespeare. Evidently, according to Professor Arnold Zwiki of Ohio State University, that’s "recency illusion" – or for you English speakers out there --recentness illusion. And, according to his Wiki page, the term is by no means consigned to the field of linguistics. So if your kid loves "Pretty Woman" by Van Halen, but doesn’t know Roy Orbison did it years earlier, according to Professor Zwicky, your kid suffers from a nasty case of recency illusion. I just think the kid would be ignorant of music history, but what do I know; I’m not a scientist like Zwicky.
It’s telling that Zwicky would take a common ordinary thing like ignorance of history, and shamelessly attempt to coin it. It seems to me that the practice of coining should only be allowed for things that are newly discovered or rarely known. By applying Zwicky’s liberal standard, I could presumably coin a term for when you see a word you think is French, but is not, (Gallicus illusion), or when you see a word you think is spelled correctly, but is not, (spellification illusion), or for the moment you realize that the expression “whatup dog” can be found in Shakespeare's 12th Night: “antediluvian realization?”
Anywho, as Zwicky’s Wiki page would have it, this term seems to be his chief claim to fame. What’s really surprising is that his peers afford him such a wide berth on this. I suppose when you are the “Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Ohio State University,” your peers tend to be awfully forgiving of your accomplishments -- although it’s hard to find too many souls brave enough to publicly tout the brilliance of this particular discovery. Me thinks most of them just avert their eyes, and let Zwicky have his illusion.
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