Newspeak

[dreamflower]

I get rather annoyed with the way newscasters and journalists suddenly decide to change the pronunciation of certain words or make up new ones out of a clear blue sky, and then suddenly everyone is doing it.

It's always bugged me that sometime in the last decade and a half, the word I had always pronounced as "Huh-RAHS-ment" suddenly turned into "Harris-ment". And at some point in time a "troop" became ONE soldier and not, well, a "troop" of soldiers.

More recently, journalists in the sewing industry have decided to use the word "sewist" for one who sews, rather than the perfectly acceptable word sewer, for fear I suppose, that even in context people might mistake it for the similarly spelled and differently pronounced word meaning a pipe that takes away waste. Personally I'd rather risk someone making the mistake. "Sewist" sounds awfully pretentious to me.

Today, in separate radio newscasts (we were running errands all day and listening to Public Radio) I heard a couple of words that made me blink.

In the first, I learned that a person who is of the ethnic group that I have always known as "Bosnian" is now called a "Bosniac". Say what? Since when? It sounds odd and makes me think of "maniac" and "Brainiac", neither of which have particularly positive connotations. Who decided to make this change? Why? What purpose does it serve? And how long before everyone else is saying "Bosniac"? Is a person from Florida sudden going to become a "Floridiac"? Or will Canadians become "Canadiacs"?

And then there was the discussion of politics. This group of pundits was discussing the upcoming debates and what the President and his opponent's strategy was going to be, and how it was going to go and they started talking about this being a "pre-mortem". Huh? They are going to dissect it BEFORE it's dead, er, happened? That has got to be one of the dumbest bits of politispeak (see I can adapt to some new words) I have ever heard of. You can hash something out all you want before it happens, but for goodness' sake! find a word for the process that makes SENSE! "Post-mortem" for going over something AFTER it happens makes a certain amount of metaphorical sense. But "mortem" does not mean "talk about something"; "mortem" refers to DEAD! *sheesh!!!*
Dumb. Just dumb.

Comments

[mrowe.livejournal.com]

Word.

My pet peeve is 'burglarize' for 'burgle'.

Oh, and I suspect they call it a 'pre-mortem' because 'a lot of waffle and hot air to fill some tv time under the pretense of meaningful analysis' is just that bit too honest for comfort's sake...

[dreamflower]

I guess "burgle" is too old-fashioned.

LOL! I like your definition of "pre-mortem".

[ellynn-ithilwen.livejournal.com]

If it is of any comfort to you, stupid things are done with language in Croatia, too, so you are not the only one...

[dreamflower]

I would guess it's universal. I wonder if the Elves ever have stupid words in Sindarin or Quenya.

[shirebound]

Newspeak has been on the rise for several years. In the corporate world, almost all we hear anymore are acronyms, and words like boundarylessness. *sigh*

[cairistiona7.livejournal.com]

I feel your pain. I get that the English language is fluid and changing. Within reason, creating new words or using old words in new ways can be wonderfully creative. But, oy, these days the onslaught of pretentious new words and phrases has nothing to do with creativity and everything to do with attempting to sound smarter than you obviously are (example: if you *were* smart, you would stick pins in your eyes before using the word "incentivize"). I mean, when you change, "Let's call a meeting so we can figure out how to lower costs and increase profits" to "We need to liase to strategize how best to incentivize teams to leverage topdown processes into greater balanced end outcomes"... you've got serious communication problems. And it scares me a little how easily I was able to come up with that last sentence. Obviously, I spent way too much of my life in the corporate world!!

By the bye, "incentivize" is my #1 Most Hated Invented Word. It literally makes my brain spasm. I can feel it. *twitches*

[surgicalsteel.livejournal.com]

I would be that person in a meeting actually looking at a PM and saying 'you do realize that boundarylessness is not a word, don't you?'

But I get away with that because I'm sifting through all the templates for spelling and grammar issues. :)

[shirebound]

Check this out:

http://reports.reedelsevier.com/cr09/people/comm-boundaryless.html

[mrowe.livejournal.com]

My eyes, they burn!

[dreamflower]

Holy cow! o_0 *blink*

[dreamflower]

Every group, whether business or medicine or even fandom, has its jargon. The bad thing is when it gets into the news and crosses the boundary lines between jargon that's appropriate for a certain sub-set of people in a certain setting and common use by people who do not really even understand the context.

[cairistiona7.livejournal.com]

Oh good golly, when I hear people spouting off some of these new words, I want to slap them in the face with the unabridged Oxford! *see rant I left after Shirebound's comment*

Bosniac?? Seriously? That sounds like, I don't know, something you take for regularity issues. "Eat more fiber and be sure you take Bosniac three times a day with meals."

In defense of "harris-ment"... that might be the British pronunciation bleeding over into American English. I don't mind that sort of thing. Bosniacs, though... no. Just no.

(Although I kinda dig "Canadiacs". Sounds like the name of a hockey team. Hockey players have that sort of maniacal bent, after all...)

[dreamflower]

Considering the size of an unabridged Oxford--that might definitely lead to a post-mortem!

I had NEVER heard "Bosniac" before, and thought at first I was hearing it wrong. I asked my husband "Are they saying "Bosniac"? Yep. They were.

Personally, I think it is more of a politically correct silliness: I began to notice the shift in pronunciation about the time that cases of sexual harassment began to appear in the news. Probably someone was afraid that a person with a juvenile mind might make jokes about the middle part of the word. Maybe I'm wrong though--maybe it is British.

LOL! You are right: Canadiacs does sound kind of like a hockey team.

Warning: crack commentfic half-drabble to follow...

[cairistiona7.livejournal.com]

"Gondoriac? What? Is that some new medicinal herb?" Odd, Elrond never told me about gondoriac...

"No, Sire. It is what the Linguistic Council recommends we call the citizens of Gondor."

For this, I nearly killed myself at the Black Gates.... "Tell the Councillors it is, and ever shall be, Gondorians!"

Re: Warning: crack commentfic half-drabble to follow...

[dreamflower]

Bwahahaha! Good for Aragorn!

[surgicalsteel.livejournal.com]

I think 'troop' is actually pretty easily explainable as journalists became more embedded with military units. It's not terribly uncommon for an NCO to refer to an individual enlisted person as a 'troop.' Journalists embedded with military units may have simply picked up on that.

And in medical-speak, we'd normally refer to 'ante-mortem' events rather than 'pre-mortem.'

[dreamflower]

Well, perhaps that does make a little more sense, though I still think of "troop" as a plural noun--it inevitably makes me do a double-take as my brain tries to compensate.

OK, so not only are they using a dumb word for their pre-debate blathering, they are using an INCORRECT word as well. (Do they really want everyone to think the candidates are dead before they ever start speaking?) But I am supposing that these pundits are unfamiliar with the correct medical term.

Does "ante-mortem" mean an evaluation of an actively dying patient? Or am I off on that?

[surgicalsteel.livejournal.com]

Well, it'd normally only be used referring to prior events - so when you're talking about a particular case at an M&M conference (mortality and morbidity) and describing what happened right before a patient died, you'd talk about ante-mortem events.

[dreamflower]

Ah! OK, so even if they were using the correct word it would STILL be incorrect!

(And I am trying to keep from thinking up a word that would be correct, because really it's a stupid thing to be doing anyway. Let the debate actually HAPPEN before you start trying to dissect it! *sigh* It mostly amounted to Pundit One saying what the candidates might say, and Pundits Two and Three imagining what the response might be to the imagined thing that has yet to be said. How do they learn so much blather?)

[rakshathedemon.livejournal.com]

I've always thought of denizens of the state of Maine as Mainiacs; an affectionate term of my father's; he spent many summers there as a boy. But Bosniac?

I never really realized what the proper pronouncement of harassment was. I used to think it was harr-ass-ment; but I've been hearing them call it harrass-ment on the television news shows, so I've been waffling in my own prononciation.

Sewist? Like, seriously?

[dreamflower]

Seriously. I get the daily "Sewing it Up" newsletter from http://www.allfreesewing.com/ml/1 and it always begins with "Hello sewists"! A google finds a number of people are now using the term. *sigh*

[elandulin.livejournal.com]

I have been noticing the 'pre-mortems' for a while now. It always bugs me when the press takes apart a speech before it's even been made (which begs the question why the speaker provides transcripts beforehand). This happens a lot to the President: "The President will be speaking on thus-and-such this morning, and here's what he's going to say..." I think this serves a particular purpose in some quarters, that being to present the audience with a particular focus and to predispose them to a positive or negative reaction. Sort of Orwellian.

Sewist!! Good grief!

And Bosniak is awful. Do they call themselves that?

[dreamflower]

Pundits have always blathered about stuff before it happens. They hope people will remember what they predicted if they are right, and forget all about it if they are wrong--that's how they build their "pundit" reputation. A speech that's been provided ahead of time is one thing--but a debate is a bit different. They really have no idea what's going to happen because it depends on the in-the-moment give and take of the arguments.

Yes. "Sewist". *sigh* And there is no real reason for it. "Sewer" is perfectly gender neutral after all. And in context, who is going to mistake an article about how to put in a hem for an article on how to fix a leaky pipe?

I have no idea. If they do, perhaps there's some excuse for it. But it does sound DREADFUL!

[elwenlj.livejournal.com]

My biggest HATE?

Nucular. Nucular?

It's NucLE-AR, people !!!!!

[dreamflower]

Nucular is a specific type of American Southernism, along with 'Mercan and gubmint and Ay-rab, they are part of the standard vocabulary of politicians from certain regions.

I grew up with those pronunciations, and they always drove me nuts anyway.

So do liberry and Feb-yoo-erry.

[ramblin_rosie]

Older pet peeve to add to the mix: pronouncing Qatar "Cutter." WHY?! Also using "ask" as a noun instead of "request," and "tween" instead of "preteen," and I'm sure there are others that are escaping me at the moment.

[dreamflower]

Also using "ask" as a noun instead of "request,"

Now that's a new one to me! OTOH, I cringe at "ax" instead of "ask".

And whenever I hear "tween" used that way, I want to yell at people that it's not defined that way! Tolkien invented the word, and if it's to be used in RL, it should mean "people in their twenties" NOT "kids who aren't teenagers yet!