wee-weed up

Benjamin Zimmer bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU
Fri Aug 21 02:20:38 UTC 2009


Any thoughts on this?

---
http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2009/08/obama_healthcare_rumors.html"Sometimes
it seems like one loud voice can drown out all the sensible voices out
there,'' President Barack Obama told supporters at a meeting of the
Democratic Party-sponsored Organizing for America today Web-cast to a
national network watching on the Internet, plus an audience listening to a
telephone conference.
"There is something about August going into September where everybody in
Washington gets all wee-weed up,'' Obama said.
---

There's plenty of silly speculation online about Obama's usage. My best
guess is that he was reaching for a euphemization of, perhaps, the "AFU" of
"SNAFU" or something similar, and ended up with the wrong euphemism. The end
result sounds like he's trying to euphemize "all pissed up," which doesn't
mean much in AmE (though I suppose it would mean "very drunk" in BrE).


--Ben Zimmer

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