- Diane Abbott in The Mirror
This takes us to what might prove the biggest problem of all: that four ex-wonks with limited life experience
- The Guardian
There is, as everybody knows, a figure of speech that if you know something well, you know it backwards. Therefore, if you know something backwards, you wonk it. Hence a policy wonk.
It is the same formation as yob, Llareggub and mooreeffoc, all of which I have blogged upon before. The first words ever said by one human to another were palindromic:
Madam, I'm Adam.
P.S. This is one of those occasions where the OED has clearly got it wrong. They conflate two different uses of the word and then suggest that over-brainy people at Harvard wouldn't spend their time making up semordnilaps.
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Aha! As I have always suspected: Russian is merely English spoken backwards.
ReplyDeleteOr vice versa.
ReplyDeleteHow did I go through life missing something so obvious?
ReplyDeleteHilarious video.
It's interesting, then, how it has morphed from 'to know something backwards' to a back-handed compliment at best, or insult at worst: to know a lot about something in a theoretical or political way which makes you unfit to deal with it in reality. According to the other side, the relevant union, or the press, anyway.
ReplyDeleteThe word always makes me think of the cartoon voice for someone boring (ala Charlie Brown's teacher): "wah wah wah waa wah wah." Perhaps it was "wonk wonk wonk wonk" all along.