travesty

[Jonathan Lighter]

The fact that "travesty" sounds a little like "tragedy" is also pertinent.
I'm not at all sure that people who use the word in this
way necessarily understand the meaning of "travesty of justice," though I
agree it may be central to the semantic evolution of the word.

JL

On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 10:33 AM, Benjamin Zimmer <
bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: travesty
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org