travesty

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 10:03 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>
> At 9:55 AM -0400 6/3/10, Rick Barr wrote:
>>I hope I'm not stating the obvious here, but it would seem that the word
>>travesty in these cases has absorbed the negative connotations of the very
>>frequent phrase "travesty of justice." People seem to clip the final two
>>words and retain the negative sense of the expression as a whole.
>
> I agree.  It's a lot like the clippery reanalyses in "chili" (for the
> stew) or "happy as a clam" (for "happy as a clam at high tide"), or
> more prosaically "private", "general", "vacuum", "substance-free",...

Or "fraught" -- which we've discussed here, and which I tackle again
in a response to an On Language reader question this week (look for it
online tomorrow at <http://www.nytimes.com/magazine/>).


--Ben Zimmer

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