My most embarrassing moment on live TV wasn’t really all that embarrassing. In fact, it’s provided me with a great way to open up after-dinner speeches since 1976. It’s best spoken, rather than written, so let me say it for you.
At the commercial break, the anchor said to me, “You said ‘mizled.’”
I said, “I know, that’s what I wrote: m-i-s-l-e-d. Mizled.”
He said, “Don’t you mean, misled?”
To be honest, I had just ripped it from the wires and I thought it sounded like a great word. I could picture a smoke-filled room and crooked businessmen saying, “We really mizled ‘em!”
Think about it. Some words, even though they don’t actually exist in the real world, oftentimes seem to get a point across better than any actual, pre-existing words. Misled (read mizled) is such a word.
Have you run across any words like that?
Just in the past few days I’ve heard some real winners and—take what you want from this—they all came by way of sports talk radio.
“A lot of people stayed for the concert after the game. Oh sure, a few of them matriculated out, but for the most part, it was a huge crowd.” Trickled out, maybe, but enrolled in college?
“I’m just going to hypothetically throw that question out there for our callers to answer.” You mean you’re going to pretend to throw the question out there?
“In lieu of the historically long match, special-priced tickets will be on sale for 11 hours.” This was in connection with the recent marathon match at Wimbledon. One of the players was coming to Atlanta for a tournament and special tickets would be on sale for 11 hours, in honor of—not in place of—the length of his match at Wimbledon.
A reminder to play-by-play announcers preparing for the final, climactic game of the season: You are not preparing for the penultimate game. Sounds dramatic, but the penultimate game would be the next-to-last game. But, as one newsroom colleague told me about dramatic news, some stories are too good to check out.
Despite my own vocabulary blunder from 34 years ago (or perhaps because of it), I have developed into quite the word nerd. I want to punch something when I hear someone misuse words. The most common sounds-like-it-should-be-the-right-word error has to be “ironically” or “literally.”
A vegetarian eaten by a bear is ironic. The fact that Barack Obama and George W. Bush like their steak cooked the same way is not.
You cannot be, as I heard on a local news soundbite recently, literally scared to death, and live to tell about it.
But some word goofs leave me laughing instead of steaming. I heard of a radio announcer who, in reporting on a defector from a communist country, talked about the East German who defecated to the West.