The tin ears of vox pops
I have Radio 4 on a fair amount, and I’m amazed how often people say things that so neatly don’t say what they mean to say. They’re not quite malapropisms, but they’re pretty close.
Just two from this morning:
On Today, someone being interviewed about the IRA’s “promise” to shoot Robert McCartney’s killers: “Ah, now, you’re over-exaggerating there.”
A woman being asked whether using a pint glass is seen as somehow not ladylike. “Well, you can have a pint glass, and men won’t, you know, turn their nose down at you.”
You can see that in both cases there’s been a collision of two ideas trying to get out of the mouth at the same time: overegging it and exaggerating it; and “turn up their nose” and “look down their nose”.
This is quite apart from the many times when people use bureaucratese to try to mask the fact that they’re not very clever, and not very sure of their position or argument, and instead try to invoke the multi-syllabic rubbish that they deal with all the time.
Examples welcomed.
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- "Simply lift building into place" (4 September 2004; score: 23.95%)
- When even the Microsoft people don't like you.. watch out, Napster (1 March 2005; score: 22.7%)
- These things I found interesting.. 4 September 2005 (5 September 2005; score: 22.16%)
![[Valid RSS]](wp-includes/images/valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed"){kind=small}
March 11th, 2005 at 12:26 am
Hehe, I heard the report about selling beer to women as well. I’m surprised nobody mentioned the possibility that the reason women don’t drink beer that much is that it tastes like horse pee, and women (unlike men) aren’t cultured to drink it. Putting it into a tulip-shaped 1/3-of-a-pint glass isn’t going to change the fact that most beers don’t taste very nice. (And you can feel the effect of a pint in your bladder, too.)
March 11th, 2005 at 9:24 am
“most beers don’t taste very nice”
A shocking statement. Proper English bitter, in my opinion, tastes very nice indeed. And if you ever need some continental stuff, try the extensive list at Belgos in Covent Garden.
My wife’s favourite pint is Theakston Olde Peculier.
March 13th, 2005 at 12:50 pm
In the private eye tradition, these would be… Fourballs?