Have a good look at the poster above.
I was quite surprised to see this ad for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra on the subway a couple of weeks ago.
Salicious??
I did not attack it with a felt marker to change it to the correct "salacious".
When you see what seem to be flagrant mistakes like this from sources that should know better, there are a number of possible reasons.
- Young People Today have created a new word by blending "salacious" and "delicious". There seems to be little evidence of such a phenomenon, however. (And judging by my frequent visits to TSO concerts, Young People Today are not their major market, to put it mildly). If it does indeed exist and you are more hip than I, please let me know.
- The mistake may be intentional to grab the viewers' attention. Indeed, some cunning person at the TSO publicity office was perhaps thinking, "If we misspell "salacious" (or invent a blend of "salacious" and "delicious"), some pedant will take a picture of it and post it on their Facebook feed or write a blog post about it and therefore give us more publicity for our concert than if we spelled it properly!" When advertisers intentionally misspell words, though, they usually pick on more common ones than "salacious", so that people will know the mistake is intentional.
- They really didn't know any better, had only ever heard "salacious" spoken, never seen it written, had NEVER HEARD OF A DICTIONARY, and spelled it the way it sounded to them. I assume the TSO's ads have to be approved by several people, so I find it amazing that no one noticed this.
"Salacious" is now used mostly of written or spoken accounts that are titillating and risqué, focusing on the sexual. Originally, when borrowed into English in the 1600s, it described lecherous people (as well as the apparently notoriously lecherous pigeons, poultry, and sparrows, who knew).
The word is derived from Latin salax (lascivious, lecherous) from salire (to jump, leap). According to the Trésor de la langue francaise, this was because one of the meanings of salire was "(of an animal) to mount another animal in mating".
But I wouldn't put it past those ancient Romans to have also spoken of "jumping someone's bones"!
And "salir" in French means to dirty, to soil, or to smear.
ReplyDeleteBut "salir" is unrelated etymologically, coming from an Old High German word meaning "drab, dull, muddy"
ReplyDeleteI'm leaning (hopefully?) toward the second explanation. I've sung Carmina, and find the blend rather appropriate. Moreover, surely an organization like the TSO knows the importance of having such high-profile publicity reviewed by a professional editor!
ReplyDeleteSurely this should be ‘more hip than me’? Looks awful the way it is:
ReplyDelete‘you are more hip than I’
Shouldn’t ‘salacious’ have single quote marks, as it is a quote within a quote?
"If we misspell "salacious"
I used to be a proofreader, hence being very picky. I read books with increasing dread, particularly those from America. They have almost totally done away with adverbs, and use 'of' in the most unusual places. Some editing is sadly lacking.
Unknown - Regarding the demise of adverbs, it frosts my socks to hear or read, "He did good", or "She did fabulous" and the like. Gack! :O(
DeleteI'll vote for "showed this to one other person in the office" instead of having it read even once by someone with a proofreader's ability to "pick fly shit out of pepper." Everyone thinks they can proofread, these days! -Kate
ReplyDeletePeople do seem to run two words together to make a third, incorrect one. A moldie oldie is "mischievious". Have those who say this run "mischievous" and "devious" together? And for sure, people spell the way they hear words rather than what they (correctly) look like. Prime example; words ending in "ose" followed by "to". And so we get "suppose to", "expose to", and so on, ad nauseam.
ReplyDelete