Funny: FUGITIVE DEFINITIONS

Subject: Funny: FUGITIVE DEFINITIONS Mon Dec 19, 2011 11:21 pm

The US academic and writer Douglas Hofstadter had a word for what is produced when one unconsciously mashes two similar phrases together to produce a phrase with a foot in two metaphorical camps but in a tent in neither (''easy go lucky''; ''gay boy loiterer''; ''a dog's life of Reilly''): he called them malaphors.

We might say the malaphor is a species, or subset, of the malapropism (''my wife is six months' poignant''; ''a damp squid''; ''the book suppository building'', and so on). And we might add the malapropism is in turn a subset of Manglish.

Manglish is what a group of teeth-grinding Australian pedants called the Plain English Foundation defines as ''any example of spin and obfuscation in our public language''. Each year they compile a list of ''the worst words and phrases we all had to endure from politicians, corporations and government agencies'' and 2011 yielded a bumper crop, among them wincing euphemisms such as ''negative good'' (from a dental industry spokesperson about teeth whitening), and ''gestational carrier'' (Nicole Kidman on the surrogate mother of her child).

The foundation's winner cannot be faulted for sheer cowardice before the word it dare not speak: Orica's use of ''fugitive emissions'' for a gas leak. To borrow the film critic Anthony Lane's ''impersonation'' of Yoda: ''Break me a flipping give.''

Funny: FUGITIVE DEFINITIONS

Funny: FUGITIVE DEFINITIONS

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