Knight moves
'Benighted' by another name
During his pre-Veterans Day visit to Washington, French President Nicolas Sarkozy awarded the Legion of Honor to seven American veterans who served in France during World War II.
Stories on the individual vets soon appeared in their hometown (or home region) news outlets, including Boston's WBUR-FM, where an announcer plugged an upcoming interview with a Maine vet: "We talk with Charles Shay, who was beknighted by Sarkozy." The station's website confirmed the spelling: Someone thought beknighted was a synonym for knighted.
It's not. Nor is beknighted in any dictionary I've checked, though it pops up with some regularity in print, either as a misspelling of benighted, meaning "clueless, ignorant," or as a joke.
For instance, a 2005 interview in the New Orleans Times-Picayune recounted a record company chief's gloomy prediction, decades ago, that the naked Lennon-Ono "Two Virgins" cover would taint the Beatles. That skeptic was Sir Joseph Lockwood; who could resist calling him "the beknighted music executive"?
When you're not kidding, though, you want to steer clear of beknighted. You don't need it: Plain knighted can handle the job. And you don't want to step on the established word - benighted, no K - which means, logically enough, "overtaken by darkness."
At first that sense was literal; a traveler on foot or on horseback wanted to get home before night fell. In the electrified world, benighted is generally figurative: "The benighted Mr. Blair," one newspaper called the British prime minister in 2005, castigating him for skipping a VE Day ceremony. The benighted may also be knighted, it's true; but there's no necessary connection.
. . .
CONDO ASSOCIATIONS: In a column last week addressed to Pervez Musharraf, the Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephens told the Pakistani president that his political rival Benazir Bhutto "did you a favor earlier this year when she all but agreed to rule in condominium with you."
Bhutto and Musharraf were planning to shack up in a cozy Islamabad flat? Not exactly. Stephens was using condominium in its original sense of "shared governance" - a sense that should be obvious enough to anyone with a bit of Latin: con "with" plus dominium "dominion."
I could have figured that out, I guess, if I'd ever looked closely at condominium; no doubt I was distracted by its similarity to condom, still an iffy word back when condos began their takeover of the urban real estate market. (No, the words aren't related. The origin of condom is a mystery, and that inventor someone told you about - Dr. Condom, Dr. Conton - is a figment of the folk etymologist's imagination.)
Condominium is (comparatively) modern Latin, the Oxford English Dictionary says, first used in Latin treatises by 17th-century German writers. These days, the geopolitical use has been all but swamped by the housing one. But it still comes in handy to demonstrate, if nothing else, that the writer wasn't born yesterday.
. . .
THE GOOD CHINA: A home center recently sent out a flier advertising bathroom fixtures, including a lavatory made of "virtuous china."
The word they wanted was vitreous, of course - glasslike, smooth. But I wondered, admiring the white surfaces, if "virtuous china" had some eggcornish appeal - that is, if the proverbial proximity of cleanliness and godliness might tempt readers (and writers) to think of these gleaming fixtures as virginal. A 2003 book called "The Healthy Home," for instance, praises the "stainless steel, clear glass, and virtuous china" and other impervious materials in its chapter on bathroom purity.
Probably it's just a mistake - but at least it's comprehensible. Nancy Friedman, who blogs about branding and naming at Away With Words, recently posted about a mysterious "cringe covered wedge ankle boot" displayed in a Macy's ad. She suspects thesaurusitis - the boots have a kind of shrink-wrapped heel, she notes, and "shrink" can also mean "cringe" - but who can be sure?
I was similarly mystified by a retail blooper, a few years ago, in a department store ad offering a sweater in "perineal blue." Maybe the writer was a gardener, distracted by perennial or periwinkle; this one you'll have to look up - and explain - for yourself.
. . .
WORDS OF THE YEAR: The WOTY season now rivals our endless holiday shopfest, stretching from Halloween into January, when the American Dialect Society, granddaddy of the WOTY, finally weighs in. Webster's New World Dictionary kicked off the 2007 round, naming the unlikely grass station, the place you'll fill the car of the future with vegetable-based fuels.
Oxford University Press continued the environmental theme by picking locavore, one who eats food produced nearby; the announcement, at OUP Blogs, and the follow-up at Language Log are worth a look. Still, I can't help thinking that 10 weeks of WOTY fever is about eight weeks more than anyone wants. 