Dr. Ink loves to gossip, but only about people he knows, so he has little to say about Tina Brown and the failure of her latest magazine venture, Talk. But the Doc, being the language dog he is, began wagging his tail and drooling with Pavlovian gusto after reading a page-one article in The New York Times about Ms. Brown and what she describes as her “flameout.”
First, the writer, one Alessandra Stanley, notes that “Ms. Brown brought her customary purpose and sang-froid to the exercise.” That odd term means ‘composure’ though it derives from the French for ‘cold-blooded.’
Then the writer quotes Ms. Brown asserting, “I have been swimming in a howling sea of schadenfreude for the past three years. I am used to it.” This German word was not in Dr. Ink’s dictionary, but he found a definition online: “A malicious satisfaction in the misfortune of others.”
Then, completing a lexical trifecta, the writer reports that “Ms. Brown felt she should be part of the zeitgeist instead of just celebrating it.” On a lovely little website, infoplease.com, Dr. Ink found this definition: “the spirit of the time; general trend of thought or feeling characteristic of a particular period of time.”
Suddenly, Dr. Ink felt the urge to pull out his favorite essay, George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” Sure enough, Old Georgie asserts his preference for the Anglo-Saxon: “Never use a foreign phrase…if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.” Hmm.
So, Tina Brown and Alessandra Stanley, what’s up with that?
True, it has not been an annus mirabilis for the divine Ms. Brown, and she may have become the bete noire of the gossip literati, but it is a faux pas rather than savoir-faire to wave the foreign bon mot rather than the Anglo mot juste. Nota bene: Dr. Ink, that illustrious nom de plume (or in this case nom de guerre), may be the literary Doppelganger that has become the enfant terrible of the journalism world. But, entre nous, he rarely makes statements ex cathedra. Rather, he explores linguistic terra incognita and and dispels his Welschmerz with a passionate cri de coeur. Think of Ink as a Feinschmecker of language, a bon vivant of clear, unaffected writing, who believes in vino veritas, even if it doesn’t always exist in journalism. As for Tina Brown, “Sic transit gloria mundi.” And Tuesday.
