• To cause one's own statements or actions to go against themselves or become entangled, thus causing one's arguments to become ineffective.
• [Taken from pretzel, the twisted pastry (Ger. Brezel), and the prefix em-, denoting the process of making into a pretzel, and used in Time's article "In the Arena" by columnist Joe Klein to describe a contradictory statement in the February 2006 issue.]--http://www.langmaker.com/db/Empretzelment
THE WORD IN USE AS A NOUN
"This is a curious self-empretzelment: How did it come about that when Bush talks about Palestinians he sounds like Ted Kennedy talking about Americans?" Klein, J. (2006). Democracy, the morning after. Time, Feb 6, 2006.
--http://www.langmaker.com/db/Empretzelment
THE NOUN FORM IN USE THIS WEEK BY ITS INVENTOR:
". . . both of these front runners seem slightly dated. McCain has lost more altitude, trailing Rudy Giuliani 29% among Republicans in a CBS poll last week. Clinton maintains her 20-point lead among democrats, but her Iraq empretzelment may be a leading indicator of a stiff, consultant-swarmed campaign that will come across as clanky in 2008. (25)--Klein, Joe. "How the Front Runners Lost Their Edge. Time magazine, March 5, 2007.
BLOGGIN' JOHN COMMENTS:
Empretzelment strikes me as a neologism that will swiftly enter our general pool of words and soon be cited in our dictionaries.
Why? Because it sports several attractive features:
• an immediately understandable metaphoric base;
• a tag-along visual image (pretzel) to embed in imagination and memory;
• an arch faux-Latin construction (oops: mixing the French with the Latin); and
• a playful sound for the mouth to "pronounciate" (my own neologism-cum-nonce word [the latter defined as a word invented expressly for a particular occasion]).
#
I like this one.
ReplyDelete