Rogeting

[Ben Zimmer]

On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 12:44 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
>
> At 8/18/2014 11:48 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>>it's all the rage--don't be sinister buttocks!
>>
>>http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/sinister-buttocks-roget-would-blush-at-the-crafty-cheek/2015027.article
>
> Somehow, with the illustration in the fore, so to speak, I can't help
> thinking that this is an error for "rogering".
>
> P.S.  I'm surprised the cited article didn't say, as I infer, that
> plagiarism was the root.  No need to look for synonyms for "powerful
> personalized services" if you haven't already seen it written somewhere.

The article's pretty explicit about it. "Roget-ing" is defined as
"disguising plagiarism by substituting synonyms, one word at a time
with no attempt to understand either the source or target text."

I wrote about some other cases of ham-handed thesaurusizing a couple
of years ago in a piece for Lapham's Quarterly, "Word for Word":

http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/reconsiderations/word-for-word.php?page=all

And here's some more on spammy synonymy:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4584

--bgz

-- 
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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