Words of wonder

With the death of Times-man William Safire, the world lost one of its great dissectors of linguistic peculiarities, not to mention a passionate practitioner of the alliteration arts. With a tip of the cap to Safire, we offer some confounding colloquial conundrums that get our goat.

With everyone interested in economic indices that apparently reveal when our country will pull itself out of its doldrums, we hear a lot of talk about a spike in the Dow, or other pertinent graphs.

According to that usage, a spike is when something shoots skyward. Then again, a spike in volleyball sees the ball slammed to the ground or, if we can get personal for a moment, into your face in 10th-grade gym class. A railroad spike or baseball spike digs into the earth, not the sky. Shouldn’t a spike in the Dow indicate a dramatic free fall, not an upsurge?

Then there’s the matter of workaholics, shopaholics and chocoholics. Obviously the derivative is alcoholic, or one addicted to alcohol, with the -ic suffix personifying the one who can’t handle his or her hard lemonade. If we subtract the -ic from the addiction iterations, we’re talking about people hooked on workahol, shopahol and chocohol. Unless we’re discussing Kahlua, there’s no such thing as chocohol.

Finally, there is the tendency among pundits to slap -gate onto anything scandalous — a nod, of course, to presidential malfeasance at the Watergate hotel in 1972. The contemporary usage includes Letterman-gate, Kanye-gate and, lest we forget, Monica-gate.

The “Watergate” scandal works because that’s where the dirty deed took place. But unless Dave and his Late Show paramours had their trysts atop a gate (talk about your dangerous liaisons!) or at that forever-besmirched Washington hotel, phrases like Letterman-gate simply don’t hold water. 

– Michael Malone details his commuting woes on Trainjotting.com.

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