‘Putting on Airs’ or Expressing One’s Thoughts?
Maeve Maddox / DailyWritingTips.com
Daniel’s word of the day on July 15, 2007, rhetoric, is an example of a useful word that some people might find offensive.
Really.
In the movie Alone With a Stranger, a man becomes furious when his brother uses the word rhetorically — “as casually as I tie my shoes!”
The detectives on Law and Order and characters in other series often remark ironically on words they consider to be out of the ordinary.
A strain of anti-intellectualism runs through American culture. Words can cause it to erupt – in real life and not just in television dramas.
In February 1999, a Washington, D.C., bureaucrat, David Howard, remarked to other staff members that certain funding had been “niggardly.”
The word “niggardly,” as by now everyone is probably aware, derives from a Middle English word meaning “miser.” It probably came into English from Icelandic and has absolutely no connection with a racial slur with which it shares a syllable. Howard was expressing the thought that the funding in question was not just inadequate, but that the people doling it out were being unnecessarily stingy.
