Thursday, February 01, 2007

Emboldenable

Can't believe I haven't seen anything on this yet: Last night, Jon Stewart riffed on the ubiquitous accusation that some action or other "emboldens the enemy". Of course this comes mostly from Bush as a tool for condemning every question about his plans (or lack thereof). Stewart has his correspondent John Oliver come on and they use embolden in various ways, including a phrase about our enemies being "an emboldenable bunch". Then they go wild with derivational morphology: How somebody could be beweakened, about enscaring people, how to get the bad guys to becave themselves again, and on and on. In the closing, they manage to get reembebolden into the mix. (They were naturally tripping over some of these forms and that extra -be- in there might be an error rather than an affix.) Would be nice to have a full transcript of that.

Sure seems like this skit could be to affixation what the famous Calvin & Hobbes strip was to verbing.

Update, Friday, 6:21: A quick google check this morning finally turns up a little bit on this piece, at Philocrites.

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