Comedy Central has hit it big with "The Daily Show"; a scary number of people get news from this program. Watching it last Wednesday (then unremittingly subjecting myself to a video clip of that night's show so I could quote accurately for this column), I found an unintentional quirk - and an opportunity - during one of the guest interviews.
Let me set the tone: Jon Stewart has welcomed his second-rate guest (actor Alan Cumming) and bumbled an icebreaker that inquired about the enjoyableness of live theater versus that of movies.
Cumming contemplates. (It will take undivided brainpower to answer this.) "Uh, I think it's more, like, you know," he stutters. Yes? It is? "Enervating," he finally lands upon, "and, yeah, more exciting."
Stewart is baffled. "So that'd be 'fun'?" he asks quizzically. Cumming affirms this assertion, prompting Stewart to repeat his newly acquired word - "Enervating!" - perhaps making a mental note to look it up later. He then adds, "You gotta throw the big words. I hear you." Things aren't going well.
"Yeah, you like that?" Cumming buzzes satisfactorily. As he starts to speak, still-bewildered Stewart cuts him off: "No, I hear it. Believe me." We believe you, Jon. Then, the apogee of the night: In a bizarrely goofy voice, Cumming says, "I'm clever." To this, Stewart responds laughingly, "You're very."
Thus ended a dialogue of complete meaninglessness about a word that neither person really knew but proceeded as though he did.
Even a comedian like Cumming couldn't recant a spoken faux pas such as labeling the "fun," "more exciting" theater as "enervating." The seriousness with which he did so nullifies any recanting. Keeping malapropisms out of speech is a chore, even for a braggadocio like Stewart.
In fairness, "enervate" is a hard word to keep straight. It sounds like a synthesis of "energize" and "invigorate," but it's not. The verb "enervate" means "to weaken or destroy the vitality of something," as in: Legions of "Daily Show" devotees enervate my belief in a rational American public. It's also a medical term; if a surgeon enervates, he removes nerves.
Cumming is guilty by association: Since "enervate" is falsely suggestive of "energize" and a number of similar words, using the former when Cumming meant the latter resulted in his choosing a word antonymous of what he tried to say.
Etymologically, "enervate" comes from two Latin words: "ex" (a preposition meaning "out of" or "on account of" that shortens to "e" before consonants) and "nervus" (a noun meaning "sinew"). We added the English suffix "-ate," meaning "to act upon."
Together, these guys make "to act upon out of the sinew" - roughly, "to take out of the sinew." Synonyms are "deplete" and "emasculate," which is a combination of the Latin words "ex" and "masculus," or "male," and the suffix "-ate."
It's all a little confusing when one realizes English also proffers "innerve" ("to give nervous energy to something"), "unnerve" ("to deprive of strength" or "to make nervous"), "nervate" (an adjective meaning "having veins") and "innervate" ("to supply a body part with nerves or to stimulate it to action").
None of these means the same as the others, and none means "to energize."
The best solution is to learn Latin. A simplistic, quick-fix approach might be to just learn your English prefixes and suffixes, and then rely on knowledge of root words - not everyone knows what "plenipotentiary" means, but most people know what "plenty" and "potent" mean. Putting these together to get "full of power" is pretty darn close.
Prefixes and suffixes will, if nothing else, help you figure out if the word is doing something, undoing something, producing an action or inhibiting one. Root words give you the "action" or the "something."
Now, if I could just enervate Jon Stewart's contract with The Daily Show.
- Rainey is a journalism sophomore.
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