'It's scary,' he said, with an audibly straight face, 'to scenarioise.'
He's not American or anything, either.
'Verbing weirds language.' *
* Hobbes to Calvin, somewhere or other
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
Radio, too
Driving home just now (the car radio is like a box of chocolates ...), I heard Hugh White, Professor of Strategic Studies at ANU, being interviewed on the subject of our deteriorating relations in recent days with Indonesia. In reply to one particularly doom-laden question about possible future developments, Prof White took my breath away:
'It's scary,' he said, with an audibly straight face, 'to scenarioise.'
He's not American or anything, either.
'Verbing weirds language.' *
* Hobbes to Calvin, somewhere or other
'It's scary,' he said, with an audibly straight face, 'to scenarioise.'
He's not American or anything, either.
'Verbing weirds language.' *
* Hobbes to Calvin, somewhere or other
Is it lazy to make up words in this way? Or just presumptuous?
ReplyDeleteI guess it could always be both.
I don't know if it's lazy. It takes a lot of effort to say scenarioise out loud.
ReplyDeleteOh, so you are a member of the fold after all!
ReplyDeleteCSH, I don't understand the impulse to make up words like 'scenarioise', but then I have used the word 'bibliobiography' in the post before this one so who am I to talk?
ReplyDeleteTC, 'Scenarioise' looks harder to say than it actually is. It looks like a misspelt French word, actually, perhaps some sort of rarefied sauce.
E - The fold? What, the radio-listening fold? Driving is one of the three things I can do, and need to be doing one of, while listening to the radio (see March 30), so the road is where I mostly get my RN, ABC-FM or local ABC fix.
I can listen to radio only after about 9.30 am. Any earlier and I get way surlier. If I want to listen to talking at that hour, I'll talk myself.
ReplyDeleteThat said, my mother-in-law has used radio to get back to sleep for years on end, and a more articulate woman it would be hard to find anywhere. (In the nicest possible way.)