WTF

Tsar!

Drug Tsar. Crime Tsar. Health Tsar. Blah Tsar.

Come on! The last Tsar was assassinated along with almost his whole family for ruining the largest country on the planet. How is this a bureaucratic role model?

You get whatshisface from that whitepeopleblog railing against the apparently incorrect/inappropriate use of Nazi, but nothing about this proliferation of Tsar, which means Emporer by the way. I mean, come on, even un-summed emperors have killed more people that Hitler ever did. Closer to home, Stalin killed about 20 million, but just because he wasn’t as effiecient as the Germans, now you can call any twat with a job description and a headline, a Tsar!

Onomatopoeia ?

There is a word out there. I was tempted to say lurking, but it’s not, it’s out there and it’s just that I can’t see it.

It’s out there like fractals are out there and it just took that hairy little Swiss Yoda guy and a dot-matrix printer to start seeing the edges.

I’ve seen the edges, because I know what the word means, I just don’t know what it is.

It’s the one that describes word that don’t sound like what they mean.

Take Sanguine, for example.

This little fucker means ‘cheerfully optimistic’, but it doesn’t sound cheerfully optimistic. It sounds dreary and mean and sad and hopeless and lost and unfound.

Even the most optimistic champion of the language couldn’t argue a case for anything stronger than a contemplative, mellow, warmish sort of half-glow leaning towards a tepid glass of stale chai tea.

Now I’m not one to argue with etymology and the route from the Latin for blood to the flushed and rosy cheeks of the eternally joyous is painfully clear, but it doesn’t change the fact that the word is just wrong.

Obviously, not being the boss of common usage, I’m in no position to do anything other than point out the absurdity of hanging on to language that’s clearly on the wrong side of the zeitgeist.

Anyway, I seem to have wandered slightly off topic.

There’s a word for words that sound like how they sound: onomatopoeia and I want to know what to call words that don’t sound like what they mean.

???