Sunday, July 29, 2012

Word of the Day: “Wazzock”


[Update 17 Jan 2016]   Now that The Mitt is off the ticket, and The Trump has taken his place, our friends across the Atlantic have unpacked  from the woolsack   the word wazzock,  saved for ceremonial occasions, and bestowed it upon that (un-)Presidential contender.
We give the historical background here:

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A florilegium of Britishisms:




Conservatives in London oozed scorn. Mayor Boris Johnson mocked “a guy called Mitt Romney". Fleet Street spanked “Nowhere Man” and “Mitt the Twit.”
Conservatives on Fox News were dumbfounded. “You have to shake your head,” Karl Rove said. Charles Krauthammer pronounced the faux pas “unbelievable, it’s beyond human understanding, it’s incomprehensible. I’m out of adjectives.”
We may wince when the blithering toff, or want-wit, as Shakespeare would say, arrives at the Brits’ home and throws his Cherry Coke Zero can in the prize rose bushes.
He came across like a wazzock, as The Daily Telegraph called him, using a British insult for a daft know-it-all.

As for the pronunciation, the stressed syllable, WAZZ-, rhymes with spazz (from spastic), and the suffix -ock is reminiscent of British ballocks (American: balls).   Indeed, quite likely the origin of the word wazzock is grounded in such associations, rather than in (say) a deformation of the word wiseacre, as has been elsewhere suggested.  (W-Allahu a`lamu.)


You can view an unretouched roentgenogram of an actual wazzock  here:
http://vocabulry.wordpress.com/?s=wazzock

For further fun wordstuff, click here:  Logophilia.

For some spicy wiseguy trashtalk, click here:  Murphy on dames.

For clues to the origins of Romney's wazzock tone-deaf cluelessness, try this:
Mitt Romney:  the Early Years

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Relief for beleaguered Nook lovers!
We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

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[Update, 1 Aug 2012]  Ms. Dowd has outdone herself, with a new word-of-the-day:  “Gowk”.  Excerpt:

The Gadding of a Gawky Gowk
Remember when Janice Soprano shot her fiance to death after he punched her in the mouth? Then she calls Tony to come over and help her. He mops up the blood and has his thugs chop up the body.
“All in all, though,” Tony tells his sister sincerely, as he drops her at the bus station, “it was a pretty good visit.”
By Sopranos standards, all in all, Mitt Romney had a pretty good visit overseas. But by political standards, it was more like Munch’s “The Scream.”
When Barack Obama went abroad in July 2008, searching for some foreign policy cred, European leaders smothered him with love and respect.
More than 200,000 Germans thronged to the Victory Column in Berlin, hailing him as “Redeemer” and “Savior.” In a joint press conference in Paris, a smitten Nicolas Sarkozy was so touchy-feely that even Obama looked a little embarrassed.
“You must want a cigarette after that,” I teased Obama on the plane to London later.
Poor Mitt Romney had no such magic carpet ride. He insulted the British and infuriated the Palestinians while pandering to the Israelis and American Jewish voters, including donors like the Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson who tagged along.
Egged on by some of the same neocon advisers who brought us the Iraq pre-emptive invasion, Romney offered “Go ahead, make my day” diplomacy, signaling he would support Israeli action to pre-emptively strike Iran’s nuclear facilities.
In an inadvertently hilarious grand finale in Warsaw, where Romney was pandering to American Catholics by dropping Pope John Paul II’s name every chance he got, his spokesman insulted the traveling press clamoring for a rare dollop of attention from the Republican contender.


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[Update 11 Oct 2012]   Don't be a wazzock!  Gin up on the latest Limeyisms:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/11/fashion/americans-are-barmy-over-britishisms.html?src=me&ref=general
"MITT ROMNEY is not the “bumbling toff” he’s made out to be..."

[Update 24 June 2013]  Someone just found this post by searching on “wassock originated in arabic”.   Such an etymology  I must very much doubt.  There is an Arabic adjective meaning ‘dirty’ which is phonetically somewhat similar to the British noun, though not very.  FWIW, Buzzfeed offers this: “Enjoying its heyday during the ‘lad’s mag’ culture of the 1990s, ‘wazzock’ is a Northern accented contraction of ‘wiseacre’.”
However, if it's Arabic you're interested, check this out:





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