Dance the Flamingo
This is ironic, but I’ve been trying without success to find the word that means: “to use the wrong word”. “Malapropism” is an approximation (as in the headline), but that seems to me a more extreme version of the condition. It reminds me of someone I used to work with, who would say things like, “She’s as sharp as a button” and “I’m not putting my head above the pulpit”.
On the theme of pulpits, in my time as a copywriter, I was a devotee of great Scot, David Ogilvy, the one-time Aga salesman who took American advertising by storm in the 1950s. In his marketing bible ‘Ogilvy on Advertising’ he wrote that, following research he changed “Dove makes soap obsolete” to “Dove makes soap old-fashioned” because consumers did not understand the word “obsolete”. On a later occasion a journalist asked him what the word “ineffable” meant, in an ad for Hathaway shirts. Ogilvy had to admit he hadn’t the faintest idea!
Hands up, I fall into this latter camp. Funny how you get a word into your head and one day find you skipped the semantics. Lately, sharp-eyed readers have chastised me for the misuse of “prone”, “simper” and “laconic”.
And then there’s “eponymous”. Never mind bemoaning that my characters are too shallow or my plots implausible, my jokes cringeworthy or my use of the present tense facile; this word generates more dissent than all the rest put together.
Now, it’s not as if I don’t know what “eponymous” means. And when you write about Buttermere the hamlet and Buttermere the lake; Grasmere the village and Grasmere the lake; and Windermere the town and Windermere the lake (you get the idea) ... it’s nigh on impossible to finish the sentence without “eponymous” sneaking under the radar. Cue the complaints.
I looked online for “most hated words” and prominent were moist, munch and maggots (all of which, worryingly, apply to Skelgill at one time or another). “Eponymous” didn’t figure, but it strikes me that it clearly lacks a fan club. It’s time to seek out and destroy.
July 2021 is the next time I have to update the front matter across the DI Skelgill series, so watch this space. In the meantime, if you find any ‘Dancing Flamingos’ – please let me know!
On the theme of pulpits, in my time as a copywriter, I was a devotee of great Scot, David Ogilvy, the one-time Aga salesman who took American advertising by storm in the 1950s. In his marketing bible ‘Ogilvy on Advertising’ he wrote that, following research he changed “Dove makes soap obsolete” to “Dove makes soap old-fashioned” because consumers did not understand the word “obsolete”. On a later occasion a journalist asked him what the word “ineffable” meant, in an ad for Hathaway shirts. Ogilvy had to admit he hadn’t the faintest idea!
Hands up, I fall into this latter camp. Funny how you get a word into your head and one day find you skipped the semantics. Lately, sharp-eyed readers have chastised me for the misuse of “prone”, “simper” and “laconic”.
And then there’s “eponymous”. Never mind bemoaning that my characters are too shallow or my plots implausible, my jokes cringeworthy or my use of the present tense facile; this word generates more dissent than all the rest put together.
Now, it’s not as if I don’t know what “eponymous” means. And when you write about Buttermere the hamlet and Buttermere the lake; Grasmere the village and Grasmere the lake; and Windermere the town and Windermere the lake (you get the idea) ... it’s nigh on impossible to finish the sentence without “eponymous” sneaking under the radar. Cue the complaints.
I looked online for “most hated words” and prominent were moist, munch and maggots (all of which, worryingly, apply to Skelgill at one time or another). “Eponymous” didn’t figure, but it strikes me that it clearly lacks a fan club. It’s time to seek out and destroy.
July 2021 is the next time I have to update the front matter across the DI Skelgill series, so watch this space. In the meantime, if you find any ‘Dancing Flamingos’ – please let me know!
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Great.I don't know if you remember Hilda Ogden in Coronation Street - she used to refer to the mural in her and Stan's living room as "the Muriel".
Another of my colleague's good ones was: "Don't get a dog to do a man's job" - which I think was a conflation of "Don't ask a boy to do a man's job" and "Don't buy a dog and bark yourself" !!
Like" He went Egg-Shit" instead of Ape-shit
Or "Have you seen the size of that Holdoff" instead of Holdall