And it's a world without interpreters and phrase-books

[venta]

Mrs Malaprop is alive, and well, and working on Radio 4. Someone on the Today programme this morning asked Nikesh Aurora whether he thought Google would always be at the cutting edge of search technology "... or whether I and a couple of guys might come up with a new logarithm".

Then Andrew Marr on Start the Week used the word "interiority".

To the dogs, I tell you.

Comments

[beckyl.livejournal.com]

algorithm? fairly easy confusion from a linguistic point of view, and I didn't catch it in my sleep befuzzled state.

Interiority though, surely that's just gibberish? what was the context? I can't even manage to come up with a phrase where I might want to use it...

[venta.livejournal.com]

Algorithm I assume, yes.

I can't honestly remember the context for interiority. It was basically being used to mean "interior-ness" and kind of made sense at the time but was ugly enough to make me shout at the radio (again).

[ewx.livejournal.com]

algorithm seems to have plenty of mangling in its history already l-)

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

I spotted the logarithm one too. [grin]

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

What's wrong with "interiority"? Quite a standard concept in modern psychology afaik?

[venta.livejournal.com]

What's wrong with "interiority"?

You have to ask ?

:)

I'll bow to your superior knowledge of psychology. It's not a concept I'm aware of, and I think they ought really to have given it a less ugly name.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

It comes from the French (blame Merleau-Ponty), and maybe sounds less awkward to them as "interiorité". But I think it's preferable to "interiorness", which I guess was the main alternative for the translation.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

(or even "intériorité", sorry ;-)

But we happily use "inferiority", which is pretty similar-sounding.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I don't mind inferiority - and I don't even mind interiority if it such a thing is a concept which really needs to be expressed. Most of my exposure to 'new words' comes via the medium of marketing-speak where words are made up wholesale to express concepts which already have perfectly good words.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I don't mind inferiority

* refrains heroically from making obvious joke *