Let's play Bad Thesaurus

[BurtWorm]

How to play: I will give you a sentence with one word taking the place of a more common word, but it will be as though I didn't know how to use a thesaurus and replaced a perfectly good word with a poorly chosen synonym, one that would be right in a different sense but makes no sense in the context at hand. Your object is to identify the wrongly chosen word and guess which word I "replaced."

I will start with an actual example of a piece of writing by someone who did not know how to use a thesaurus. This is a person who actually made his living writing true crime stories--a classic hack--and I came upon it when I worked as an editor at one of the last of old pulp crime magazines, True Detective. Okay, ready?

"The suspect gave a sated statement to the police."

This is a sentence I came upon in this hack's writing numerous times. You'd think he would have gone to the thesaurus and found a different word every time, but you would be wrong. Once he found the malaprop that worked for him, he stuck with it.

Okay, which is the wrong word, and what word (or idea) does it replace?

[Demit]

1. sated=full.

And when I realized that, the lacerates ran down my face. :)

[spatlese]

2. LOL.. I remember that...

lacerates... :))

[librechik]

3. tears are lacerates

fer crying out loud

Speaking of ululating, I just stopped myself from doing that at the sting of my reply.

:loveya:

[BurtWorm]

9. Well sated!

I had a similar reaction when I suddenly realized why he kept putting that bizarre sentence in almost every piece he wrote. He had a whole slew of bad thesaurus gems, most of which, I'm sorry to say, I can't remember. But my all time favorite was a substitute for kind fo a bizarre metaphor in its own right. I think he was going for "the hounds of justice bayed," to describe the excitement detectives felt when they realized they were onto the soution of a case. That would have been weird enough as it was, but he changed it to "The cockapoos of justice yipped."

We gave him the pen-name CP Justyce after that!

[Demit]

4. Ok, what's wrong with this example of bad writing? "Give me the ham,"

she hissed.

[On the Road]

8. Oh, There are no Silibants

You can't hiss a g, v, m, or th.

[Demit]

10. yesssss!

except you mean sibilants, right? :)

[On the Road]

5. I Like This Game

If I may jump in with another real example:

In a former job, I used to be a liaison with MCI for telephone fraud issues. The manager of the fraud operation was a feisty working-class Irish woman in her 40s. Once, after discussing a new type of fraud, she said: "That sounds like something my son would do. But I don't have to worry about that now, he's incapacitated."

Imagining her son in a wheelchair, I said "Pam, what's the matter with your son? What happened?"

At which point she looked at me as if I were the stupidest person on earth and said......

[Demit]

6. he was incarcerated?

[On the Road]

11. Correct!

"He's in PRISON!"

[librechik]

7. it's devilishly hard

to solve the puzzle and compose a new one that makes sense. Ack!

[spatlese]

12. did she mean...

emancipated?

[Demit]

13. "emandated", more like.

[On the Road]

14. No, DemItAllAnyway Was Correct

she meant "incarcerated" instead of "incapacitated."