Just a place to jot down my musings.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

And the winner of the mostest ugliestest word goes to …

… “winningest”!

Seriously, who on Earth (or in America, to be precise, since to my knowledge nobody outside the US actually uses this linguistic abomination) thought that this word makes any sense? Did its coiner pause to reflect, even for a moment, about whether the structure of the word hung together in any coherent way? Or whether the meaning the word was intended to have (a) needed a single word to express it, and (b) was in fact expressed in some sensible way by this word?

And now, the New York Times, of all places, uses it. Admittedly, it’s only its Magazine section, but why oh why would someone use this horrid, cumbersome word at all?

If there was an annual competition for “hideousest word of the year”, “winningest” would be the winningest word.


2 comments:

  1. Gokul, why don't you blog anymore? I miss your thought-provoking ramble.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Had I but world enough, and time,
    This blogging, Anon, were no crime.

    ReplyDelete

Why pearls, and why strung at random?

In his translation of the famous "Turk of Shirazghazal of Hafez into florid English, Sir William Jones, the philologist and Sanskrit scholar and polyglot extraordinaire, transformed the following couplet:

غزل گفتی و در سفتی بیا و خوش بخوان حافظ

که بر نظم تو افشاند فلک عقد ثریا را


into:

Go boldly forth, my simple lay,
Whose accents flow with artless ease,
Like orient pearls at random strung.

The "translation" is terribly inaccurate, but worse, the phrase is a gross misrepresentation of the highly structured organization of Persian poetry. Regardless, I picked it as the name of my blog for a number of reasons: 
1) I don't expect the ordering of my posts to follow any rhyme or reason
2) Since "at random strung" is a rather meaningless phrase, I decided to go with the longer but more pompous "pearls at random strung". I rest assured that my readers are unlikely to deduce from this an effort on my part to arrogate some of Hafez's peerless brilliance!

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Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
—W.H. Davies, “Leisure”