Ill Chosen Words

I have returned from France, where I enjoyed myself immensely, aided and abetted by the Compte de Rienville and Parisian haute cuisine.*  I wanted to "stay in the mood" as it were, and thus for this week's post will avoid getting enmeshed in the trials and tribulations that afflict countries at the present. Rather, I should like to draw to the reader's attention some words and phrases that really should never have employed in the manner that they presently exist.

Here are three examples.

Blimp. This word is particularly ill-suited to its purpose. Think about it. It hits one's ears as "be limp", thus urging a state of collapse and not what you want in your mind if you are hundreds of metres above the ground. In this interpretation it also has unfortunate sexual connotations -- but enough said. A better choice: dirigible.

Fracking. Environmentalists have a field day with this term, and justly so. Now in this post I am not here to get into the pros and cons of fracking, but to lament the easy attack avenue offered by the term. I have often seen in publications damning the process the phrase "fracking the earth" as if the earth was some helpless damsel in distress, and in danger of losing her virtue.

There may be a case to be made here, but the term makes it too easy to attack. A better choice: Horizontal retrieval.

Idle No More. This phrase, used by Canada's First Nations to drum up support for their cause, borders on the silly. If you look at it in terms of semantics, it avers that the First Nations tribes were once idle, but now are not.  Is this the image First Nations wish to project?  Have Tecumseh and Joseph Brant been forgotten?

That's the trouble with not thinking these things through. So former Congresswoman Bella Abzug, who had no use for the term "housewife" because it implies a wife (or wives) somewhere else.
In the case of the First Nations, a better choice would be Dependent No More.

Of course, using language with skill and ability is difficult, and one can easily get carried away into nonsense. Here is the 18th Century Irish legislator Sir Boyle Roche commenting on things to come: "All along the untrodden paths of the future I can see the footprints of an unseen hand."

I rest my case.

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* I offered the good Lady the observation that haute cuisine could also mean eating a meal on the moon. She threw Jamie Oliver's latest book at me. -- Ed.