irregardless, AND MISFEASANCE?!?!?

[Joel S. Berson]

At 7/30/2010 01:23 PM, you wrote:
>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.

I appear to have been led down the garden path of "misfeasants", rosy
though it may have been.  Although prhaps the word is needed.


>>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 think there is a real distinction in law, but I won't try to uncover it.

(In passing, having encountered "malecontents" often in 18th-century
writings, I have felt a real deprivation that I have not seen any
"femalecontents".)

Joel

>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."

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