Vocab Words

by Kieran Healy on January 13, 2004

Ted asks:

bq. O’Reilly has repeatedly lied about the interview in which he told Jeremy Glick to “shut up” and cut off his microphone. As it turns out, transcripts can be checked on this intergummy thing. Someone should make up a phrase about that.

I propose that Bill is here speaking a dialect we shall call reverse transcriptese.

{ 7 comments }

1

tcb 01.13.04 at 8:07 am

That has to be one of the worst puns I’ve ever heard! (But since all the good ones are taken, the only goal is to achieve the worst, I suppose.)

2

Joey Jojo 01.13.04 at 1:57 pm

Slightly OT but every time I read about this O’Reilly lie, for some reason I always read it as “he told Jiminy Glick to “shut up” and cut off his microphone”

That bastard! How can anyone get angry at Martin Short?

Oh, Jeremy, not Jiminy.

3

northernLights 01.13.04 at 3:50 pm

Linguists will be happy that finally, the steady decline in the number of the world’s languages and dialects has been reversed.

4

matt 01.13.04 at 8:29 pm

the problem with reverse transcriptese is i keep picturing bill o’reilly performing a strip tease. or worse, a reverse trans strip tease.

5

martin 01.13.04 at 10:44 pm

Dare I ask, if readers are aware that reverse transcriptase (-ase not -ese) is the enzyme used and required by RNA viruses to start the replication of their genomes when they infect cells?

As a somewhat left-leaning molecular biologist, this term is brilliant!

6

tcb 01.14.04 at 3:46 am

I thought the bad pun was about reverse transcriptase, which it probably is, but the “trans strip tease” is an EVEN WORSE pun.

Can we do worse than that?

:-)

7

chujoe 01.15.04 at 12:02 pm

I come to CT for good commentary with a recherché twist–man, that pun is about as recherché as they come! (I did get the enzyme reference, btw, & I am a lit. prof.)

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