Word of the Day: “Wazzock”

[Update 17 Jan 2016]   Now that The Mitt is off the ticket, and The Trump has taken his place, our friends across the Atlantic have unpacked  from the woolsack   the word wazzock,  saved for ceremonial occasions, and bestowed it upon that (un-)Presidential contender.

We give the historical background here:

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A florilegium of Britishisms:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/opinion/sunday/dowd-mitts-olympic-meddle.html?_r=1&ref=maureendowd&pagewanted=print

Conservatives in London oozed scorn. Mayor Boris Johnson mocked “a guy called Mitt Romney". Fleet Street spanked “Nowhere Man” and “Mitt the Twit.”

Conservatives on Fox News were dumbfounded. “You have to shake your head,” Karl Rove said. Charles Krauthammer pronounced the faux pas “unbelievable, it’s beyond human understanding, it’s incomprehensible. I’m out of adjectives.”

We may wince when the blithering toff, or want-wit, as Shakespeare would say, arrives at the Brits’ home and throws his Cherry Coke Zero can in the prize rose bushes.

He came across like a wazzock, as The Daily Telegraph called him, using a British insult for a daft know-it-all.

As for the pronunciation, the stressed syllable, WAZZ-, rhymes with spazz (from spastic), and the suffix -ock is reminiscent of British ballocks (American: balls).   Indeed, quite likely the origin of the word wazzock is grounded in such associations, rather than in (say) a deformation of the word wiseacre, as has been elsewhere suggested.  (W-Allahu a`lamu.)


You can view an unretouched roentgenogram of an actual wazzock  here:
http://vocabulry.wordpress.com/?s=wazzock

For further fun wordstuff, click here:  Logophilia.

For some spicy wiseguy trashtalk, click here:  Murphy on dames.

For clues to the origins of Romney's wazzock tone-deaf cluelessness, try this:
Mitt Romney:  the Early Years

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~ Commercial break ~

Relief for beleaguered Nook lovers!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

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[Update, 1 Aug 2012]  Ms. Dowd has outdone herself, with a new word-of-the-day:  “Gowk”.  Excerpt:

The Gadding of a Gawky Gowk

Remember when Janice Soprano shot her fiance to death after he punched her in the mouth? Then she calls Tony to come over and help her. He mops up the blood and has his thugs chop up the body.

“All in all, though,” Tony tells his sister sincerely, as he drops her at the bus station, “it was a pretty good visit.”

By Sopranos standards, all in all, Mitt Romney had a pretty good visit overseas. But by political standards, it was more like Munch’s “The Scream.”

When Barack Obama went abroad in July 2008, searching for some foreign policy cred, European leaders smothered him with love and respect.

More than 200,000 Germans thronged to the Victory Column in Berlin, hailing him as “Redeemer” and “Savior.” In a joint press conference in Paris, a smitten Nicolas Sarkozy was so touchy-feely that even Obama looked a little embarrassed.

“You must want a cigarette after that,” I teased Obama on the plane to London later.

Poor Mitt Romney had no such magic carpet ride. He insulted the British and infuriated the Palestinians while pandering to the Israelis and American Jewish voters, including donors like the Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson who tagged along.

Egged on by some of the same neocon advisers who brought us the Iraq pre-emptive invasion, Romney offered “Go ahead, make my day” diplomacy, signaling he would support Israeli action to pre-emptively strike Iran’s nuclear facilities.

In an inadvertently hilarious grand finale in Warsaw, where Romney was pandering to American Catholics by dropping Pope John Paul II’s name every chance he got, his spokesman insulted the traveling press clamoring for a rare dollop of attention from the Republican contender.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/01/opinion/dowd-gadding-of-a-gawky-gowk.html?src=me&ref=general

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Falls Sie im Doktor-Justiz-Sammelsurium

weiterblättern möchten,

Bitte hier klicken:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Deutschtum

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[Update 11 Oct 2012]   Don't be a wazzock!  Gin up on the latest Limeyisms:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/11/fashion/americans-are-barmy-over-britishisms.html?src=me&ref=general
"MITT ROMNEY is not the “bumbling toff” he’s made out to be..."

[Update 24 June 2013]  Someone just found this post by searching on “wassock originated in arabic”.   Such an etymology  I must very much doubt.  There is an Arabic adjective meaning ‘dirty’ which is phonetically somewhat similar to the British noun, though not very.  FWIW, Buzzfeed offers this: “Enjoying its heyday during the ‘lad’s mag’ culture of the 1990s, ‘wazzock’ is a Northern accented contraction of ‘wiseacre’.”
However, if it's Arabic you're interested, check this out:

The Semantics of Form in Arabic

Phrase of the Day: “Gingrich marriage”

“I hold this truthitude to be self-sacred:

 A marriage is between  a man;   a woman;   and another woman or two.”

-- Newt Gingrich, in effect (his deeds, not his words)

In origin, a "Gingrich marriage",  a.k.a. "open adultery", is simply the old traditional French ménage à trois, in which the wife tolerates the husband’s mistress in return for lots of loot. France is, after all, the home of Dior, Chanel, and many another caterer to woman’s vanity;  in the U.S., Gingrich had to cope by running a tab at Tiffany’s.(*)  The classic case of this is that of French President François “le Cochon” Mitterand, who begat a daughter on his longtime paramour; both the wife and the fille de joie attended his funeral side by side, each barely able to suppress a smile at how much swag they’d both garnered.  (He had plenty to distribute  since, like Gingrich, Mitterand was not only morally bankrupt, but financially corrupt -- read about it in Wiki.  Unlike Gingrich, who was heavily fined for his crimes, Mitterand got off scot-free.)

So, Newt does it French-fashion:  but with an American twist.  In France, with Gallic cynicism,  the public just shrugs;  but in America, Newt gets to pursue his steamy sex-escapades  while at the same time posing and pontificating  as a defender of marriage and traditional values.  (Actually he is defending traditional values, just not American traditional values, but rather  those of the Bourbon monarchy.)

Newt playing dress-up

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Travaillant au noir,

le détective  se trouve aux prises

avec le Saint-Esprit

C’est quoi, le péchéirrémissible ???

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[Update 28 Jan 2012]

Further evidence of Gingrich’s essential Frenchness (testimony bearing the full faith and credit of the New York Times):

Mr Potato-Puff is really a French-frie

(At first that was a typo;  but it looks good:  frie, like Brie.)

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(*) Note:   In all candor, I was pretty much winging it  here, intuiting a causal explanation for a perplexing pattern (what C.S. Pierce dubbed  abduction).  But the hunch is confirmed by an article in this week’s New Yorker:

Callista did not want him to run for President.

That’s why he had to buy her so much damn jewelry.

-- former Gingrich strategist, who quit in disgust with the candidate

Incidentally --  This is the second excellent New Yorker article about His Newtitude  in roughly as many weeks.  (The earlier one we alluded to here .)  The new one, deftly crafted by Ariel Levy, focusses on El Newtitudamen’s previous paramour and current (third time’s the charm) "wife", Callista.  (As the omniscient Wikipedia informs us, the word comes from Greek καλλίστη, meaning ‘most beautiful’, although it also refers to “a genus of bivalve” -- the latter presumably not the original motivation for the choice of her rather odd-sounding name, though it does suggest an anatomical detail which some might find alluring.)

The article is titled “The Good Wife”; though to be fair, it would be wrong to focus on a politician’s spouse of whatever gender.  Not the issue here.  Merely from a sociological standpoint -- nothing that should influence your vote -- one does perforce note this further confirmation of Republican infatuation with Helmet Hair (which Der Newt himself sports -- unless it’s a toupee):

Her hair is platinum blond and very stiff, with one remarkable lock  styled into an immobile, upward swoosh.

(Her hairstylist calls this "the Callista".)  What is it with Republicans  and being fake  right down to their fingernails?   (“She has the style and smile of an astronaut’s wife,” notes Levy.)

More disturbingly, Levy observes the similarity of The Newtina to that amped-up psychopathic android  Michelle Bachmann:

She is slender, with … bright-blue eyes that are always wide open.

We also learn -- Too Much Information ! -- that, while Romney married his high-school sweetheart, The Gingrich married his high-school ... geometry teacher.  Ohhh-kayyy .....  Not that there's anything wr--    ((vomits)).

Reluctantly, we must enter the gutter -- for it is the gutter where Gingrich lives -- and learn (to our sorrow) that at the time that Gingrinch was “leading the charge against Bill Clinton  for his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky” (and dalliance is not a euphemism here, for they never Went All The Way:  something decent in Clinton, that does not exist in Gingrich, held him back. -- Cf. the really touching scene with Kevin Spacey and Scarlett Johansson in “American Beauty”), the object of his lust

Callista was a congressional staffer  twenty-three years Gingerich’s junior,  the same age as his daughter Jackie.

There is more -- but enough, but enough.  Let her epitaph be simply this, quoted from the president of the conservative group Concerned Women for America:

~ The third wife doesn’t get to be the First Lady. ~

Amen.

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[Update 29 January 2012]  Monsieur le comte de Gingrich dismisses all sniping at how he garnered his millions (not by any actual useful labor, as it happens, but by la plus vielle profession du monde).  Hear him lecture here, in French (I assume it is he -- sounds like him, anyway):

L’argent n’a pas d’odeur.

(And yet, if that be true, what is that stench of sulphur ?)

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Si cela vous parle,

savourez la série noire

en argot authentique d’Amérique :

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justiceexcerptdivorce.html

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[Update 5 February 2012]  The Queen of Snark at the NYTimes  has a go at Callista.

Sample:

When Barack is cocky and looks at Michelle, he might see her thinking: “You’re no messiah. Pick up your socks.” But when Newt is cocky and looks at Callista, he sees her thinking: “You are the messiah. We’ll have your socks bronzed.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/opinion/sunday/dowd-the-great-mans-wife.html?_r=1&ref=global

[Update 5 April 2012] You ... can ... not  make this stuff up:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/gingrich-health-care-think-tank-files-for-bankruptcy-protection/2012/04/05/gIQAvgy2xS_story.html?hpid=z2