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GROUNDSWELL OF GOODWILL TOWARD JAPAN AFTER DISASTERS.
This is a trifle unfortunate. One might deduce from reading the newspapers that groundswell is a purely technical term that can only be applied to group emotions - a groundswell of opinion or support or whimsy - and I suppose that if you thought about the word at all you would assume that it was about swelling ground.
Only partly. A groundswell is a large wave or rise in the level of the sea caused by an earthquake. Yep. Groundswell is another word for tsunami.
Now go and read that headline again.
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yeah that is pretty inappropriate. They also stopped using the term tidal wave for tsunami's as they realised that Tsunami's aren't tidal at all.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunami
ReplyDelete"Blowing hot and cold" is a well-misunderstood phrase, too. In Aesop's fable, a man is able to both warm his hands and cool his food by blowing on them, which his friend the faun (who is half goat, though the man is too polite to mention it) thinks is monstrously strange. So if I say you're blowing hot and cold, you're doing something perfectly reasonable, but I don't understand it.
ReplyDeleteI don't know how this got to be such a soundbite staple, but it livens up the news occasionally if you bear the origin in mind.
I thought groundswell was the swelling of the ground due to the freezing of its water content, in cold countries.
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