Context Cluelessness

 “Certainly Mr. Trump’s fabled étourderie and his inability to staff a cabinet with qualified officials sympathetic to what was ostensibly his agenda are a part of the story.”

                    —“Biden’s First 100 Days Would Make Trump Jealous,” Matthew          Walther, New York Times, April 30, 2021.

For those of you who don’t speak/understand French [raises hand], Google Translate informs us that the fifth word in that sentence translates to “thoughtlessness.” Another translation site suggests “blundering,” which seems more apropos, given the former guy’s propensity for, well, blundering. The point of today’s entry, though, is not to comment on Donald Trump’s ineptitude, nor to discuss the finer points of translation, but rather to take issue with the writer and/or editor of the article in which the opening sentence appears.

Etourderie is not particularly common, not a foreign word or phrase that most moderately well-read English speakers (such as readers of the New York Times) would be familiar with. It’s no eclair or soupçon or joie de vivre.

And don’t get me wrong: I certainly don’t object to writers engaging in vocabularical calisthenics, whether by coining neologisms (like, I presume, vocabularical) or simply by reaching deep into their mental dictionaries to dazzle readers with sesquipedalian pyrotechnics. Indeed, I could argue that a writer has a responsibility to employ le mot juste in order not only to convey precise meaning but to offer the reader a bit of enlightenment. I, for one, now know what etourderie means—though I’m no closer to knowing how to pronounce it—and this piece of knowledge has now taken its place in my mental universe.

(Unfortunately, since I no longer have the capacity to add information to my store of knowledge without removing some equally large piece of information, I no longer know what “crepuscular” means. DON’T TELL ME! I’m trying to hold on to etourderie at least through the end of this afternoon, when the light starts to become. . . something.)

The point, here, is that, when a writer deploys an unfamiliar word, fulfilling the responsibility to enlighten the reader comes with an additional responsibility of providing sufficient context for the reader to figure out the meaning. In this case, in an article describing how President Biden’s actions have occasionally been indistinguishable from what one might have expected from his predecessor, and in a sentence describing some of Trump’s shortcomings, one could guess that etourderie had a negative connotation. But any number of English words or phrases could be plugged into that sentence with apparently equal effectiveness: bigotry, racism, self-aggrandizement, narcissism, thin-skin, megalomania. . .

(DIGRESSION: Donald Trump is a truly horrible and worthless piece of human garbage, isn’t he? EOD)

Using big words for their own sake is not great writing. It’s just rude.

Also, for the record, there’s nothing “fabled” about Trump’s etourderie: The man is unarguably a blundering moron.