irregardless, AND MISFEASANCE?!?!?

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:03 PM -0400 7/30/10, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>At 7/30/2010 11:45 AM, David Barnhart wrote:
>>I heard "misfeasants" this morning on NPR of all places.
>
>There is of course misfeasance (and malfeasance), and this form seems
>natural and more pleasing than the also-absent misfeaser.  (Or was it
>an adjective on NPR?)  And where else on the radio would one expect
>to hear such a word?  (There are a few hits on Google -- including
>one from the Merriam-Webster on-line dictionary ... which says it is
>not a word.)
>
>Was someone thinking of the difference between misconduct and
>malconduct?  That pair of oppositely-gendered advice columnists.
>
>If the context was the recently-expelled Russian spies, I could
>imagine such a distinction, whether -feasance or -conduct -- since
>they may have been doing nothing illegal, merely gathering and
>passing on information available to the public.
>
>Joel

It seems in looking at various sites on "malfeasance" and
"misfeasance" as though there is in principle a distinction, albeit
differently represented (one version is that misfeasance may involve
performing an intrinsically OK act wrongly or performing a harmful
act unintentionally, while malfeasance is worse, and potentially
actionable, or more so), but that this distinction is often ignored
or confused.  I thought it might be like polygamy vs. bigamy, where
the main difference --despite the usual meaning of the prefixes--is
usually the a priori illegal status of the latter, as referenced in
the classic limerick (slightly altered here in honor of the eponymous
Connecticut town):

There once was a man of Old Lyme
Who married three wives at a time.
    When asked why a third
    He replied "One's absurd,
And bigamy, sir, is a crime."

LH

>
>
>>DKB
>>
>>>Larry Horn wrote:
>>
>>>Those benighted ignorami Ruskin and
>>>London--didn't they realize there's no such word
>>>as "unregardless"?  It's not in the dictionary!
>>>What they meant, of course, was "irregardless"!
>>
>>>LH
>>
>>------------------------------------------------------------
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>
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org