Rogeting

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Aug 18, 2014, at 10:17 AM, Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at GMAIL.COM> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Rogeting
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> 
> 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

and recently on my blog, with a Zippy the Pinhead cartoon:

http://arnoldzwicky.org/2014/08/05/thesaurus-play/

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