The Words of the Week - 5/14/2021

Happy lilac season!

'Bold-faced’ & ’Bald-faced’

Several words increased in lookups after representative Andrew Clyde averred strongly that the insurrection that occurred on January 6th was in fact no such thing, and that to say otherwise was a lie. Various media outlets could not quite agree about whether the congressman believed it to be a lie of the bold-faced or the bald-faced variety.

"There was no insurrection,” Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., said. “To call it an insurrection is a bold-faced lie.”
— Hayes Brown, MSNBC, 13 May 2021

GOP congressman says calling the Capitol attack an insurrection is 'a bald-faced lie' and compares the rioters to tourists
— (headline) Business Insider, 12 May 2021

We define bold-faced and bald-faced in different ways, although when each is used to modify lie the words are used in synonymous fashion by many people. Bold-faced is defined as “bold in manner or conduct” and “being or set in boldface” (when used in this latter sense the word is typically written as boldfaced). Bald-faced, on the other hand, is a variant of an older word, barefaced, which we define in fashion literal (“having the face uncovered”) and figurative (“having or showing a lack of scruples”).

All three of these words (barefaced, bald-faced, and bold-faced) have been used to modify lie. The earliest such pairing is for barefaced lie, in use since at least the beginning of the 18th century. Bold-faced lie has been in use since the end of that century, while bald-faced lie, the most recent, appears in print in the middle of the 19th.

And being assured of Christ’s Resurrection, by the Testimony of these very soldiers, whom they had placed as a Guard about his Sepulchre, corrupt these Witnesses with Money, to disguise it with a bare-faced lie….
— Daniel Whitby, A paraphrase and Commentary on the New Testament, 1703

…and they will appear to put on a knavish kind of smile, and while the lie is telling, only utter monosyllables, such as hum! hah! true! And right!—when at the same time they believe it is a bold-faced lie.
—Truth exploded; or, The art of lying and swearing, made easy, and its usefulness explained, 1796

We do not hesitate to say that the statement of the Charleston Free Press is a bald-faced lie.
— Pittsburgh Daily Post, 25 May 1853

In spite of its long history of use many usage guides consider bold-faced lie to be incorrect. It is increasing in popularity, but still is less commonly found than lies of the bald-faced kind.

’Saboteur’

Saboteur trending in lookups twice last week, for disparate reasons; first after a doctor on television referred to Tucker Carlson as one, followed by news of the death of an actor who had starred in a film by this name.

On Sunday, CNN medical analyst Dr. Jonathan Reiner called Carlson a pandemic recovery “saboteur,” adding, “I have two questions for Tucker Carlson. Number one, you have been vaccinated? Number two, why won’t you tell your audience whether you have been vaccinated? I am tired of his nonsense.”
— Caleb Ecarma, Vanity Fair, 10 May 2021

Norman Lloyd, Saboteur and Dead Poets Society actor, dies at 106
— (headline) Entertainment Weekly (ew.com), 11 May 2021

We define saboteur as “one that practices sabotage.” Both saboteur and sabotage come from the French saboter, meaning “to botch, do in a clumsy or slipshod way.” The word has been in English use since the early 20th century.

He concluded with the declaration that “all that was necessary to bring about a revolution was a handful of determined saboteurs in the public departments of electricity, gas, water and transport.
— The Butte Miner (Butte, MT), 2 Jan. 1910

’Junkie’

Junkie also had a rare moment in the sun last weekend, after Donald Trump opined that this word was a fitting descriptor for the horse who had recently won the Kentucky Derby.

This year’s Kentucky Derby-winning horse, Medina Spirit, tested positive for steroids over the weekend. Donald Trump took to his blog to weigh in with a statement in which he referred to the horse as a “junkie.”
— Trish Bendix, The New York Times, 11 May 2021

Junkie is a word rarely applied to non-human animals; it appears to have begun being used in the beginning of the 20th century, initially with the meaning of “a junk dealer.” In the 1920s it began to experiment with semantic broadening, but just a little taste. Before it realized what had happened the old junkie meaning had started to fall away, largely replaced by the meaning “a narcotics peddler or addict,” followed by “a person who gets an unusual amount of pleasure from or has an unusual amount of interest in something.”

’Oust’ & ‘Ouster’

Both oust and ouster were prominently featured in numerous headlines and news articles last week, after Republican members of Congress performed the former in order to effect the later, with regards to Liz Cheney.

Cheney defiant as Republicans oust her from leadership for rebuking Trump
— (headline), NBC News, 11 May 2021

After House GOP ouster, can Liz Cheney hold on to Wyoming seat?
— (headline) Christian Science Monitor, 13 May 2021

The verb oust may be defined as “to remove from or dispossess of property or position by legal action, by force, or by the compulsion of necessity,” “to take away (something, such as a right or authority),” or “to take the place of.” Ouster, a noun, carries such meanings as “a wrongful dispossession,” “a judgment removing an officer or depriving a corporation of a franchise,” and “expulsion.”

Our Antedating of the Week: ’unrecognizable’

Our antedating of the week is unrecognizable, in recognition of a newspaper having used the word in maladroit fashion, through using it to describe a man who many people felt was, in fact, eminently recognizable.

After decades of hit movies and multiple awards, Leonardo DiCaprio probably has one of the best-known faces in Hollywood. Tell that to the New York Post. On Monday, the publication tweeted out a story about the A-list actor with a photo of him from the set of his next film for director Martin Scorsese, calling DiCaprio “unrecognizable.”
— Michael Ordoña, Los Angeles Times, 11 May 2021

Our previous earliest known use of this word (defined as “incapable of being identified or recognized : not recognizable”) had come in 1817. Recent findings show that we have been finding things unrecognizable since at least 1806

I have for a long time, with mingled emotions of pity, contempt, and regret, beheld certain growing evils in society; evils, unrecognizable, by the judicial department, yet more pernicious than many that are punishable.
— Political Barometer, (Poughkeepsie, NY), 22 Jul. 1806