Stop talking about ‘gaffes’. You’re using the word completely wrongly and in so doing, minimising the extent of the government’s wrong-doing.
Gaffes. Gaffes. Gaffes. I tune in to Radio 101 and I hear ‘gaffes’. I switch to Net TV and there it is again: gaffes. I have conversations with people and they speak to me about the government’s gaffes, the Labour Party’s gaffes.
I moderate the hundreds of comments pouring in to this website and sure enough, there it is again, tempting me to bring out my blue pencil: gaffes.
This has been setting my teeth on edge for so long that, now that the more pressing matter of a third seat is done and dusted, I’m going to write about this major priority.
A ‘gaffe’ is an unintentional remark or minor blunder that causes embarrassment. It is not an act of wrong-doing, a bad decision, or cronyism.
Example of a gaffe: you meet a friend and mention in passing that you’ve just seen his wife at lunch with her girlfriends. And he goes, “Oh really? I thought she was at work today. I wonder why she didn’t mention that she’d taken the day off.”
That’s a gaffe: your remark to the husband.
Another example of a gaffe: you’re at a party and meet somebody for the first time. “Your husband is such a nice man,” you tell her, having seen her out with him the previous day. “Well, actually, that’s not my husband,” she replies. Then you find out that he’s married to the other woman standing next to you, who has been listening to this conversation.
You will notice from this explanation that a government deal with China is not a gaffe, that the sale of citizenship is not a gaffe, and that putting your cronies on the state payroll is not a gaffe.
So stop using the word. Please. It not only betrays ignorance and poverty of vocabulary, but it also minimises the true extent of what the government is doing.
And incidentally, it’s spelled and pronounced ‘gaffes’ and not ‘guffs’.
13 Comments Comment
Reply to thealley Click here to cancel reply
A “gaffe” is an unintended lapse.
It is not a deliberate, consistent attempt to deceive many people on a massive scale
To put it more simply, a ‘gaffe’ is putting one’s foot in it.
Precisely. This government is not into gaffes. It intentionally plans secret agreements with dictatorial countries such as China and it is completely aware of doing it behind everybody’s back. This is known as deceit.
Brilliant piece.
These are wrong decisions. In some cases they would even merit the word “disaster”.
Again, no. Disasters happen by accent. These are deliberate decisions.
The nub of the problem is that there is no word for “evil” in Maltese.
Accident. Damned auto-correction.
Mitt Romney made some disastrous gaffes when on a trip to England a couple of years ago.
Can we agree on “decizjoni li gabet dizastru?”
Would ‘Qerq’ fit the bill? I think it’s perfect. It describes a very sinister and moral kind of evil. Does it also share the same root with the verb ‘qarraq’?
‘Qerq’ would be closer to cheating than evil.
How would you say, for example: “Saddam Hussein’s evil regime”. Or “The evil of Mintoff endures”.
Because “hazin/hazen” doesn’t quite cut it. It’s closer to “wrong” or to “cunning” than to evil.
We should do politics in English. It would be so much better.
Anyway, Net News people listen up: “Il-hazen deliberat tal-gvern.” And if that sounds contrived then just switch to English. Hell, we can’t be held up by the inadequacies of language.
In their highly amusing, little book “The Meaning of Liff” (and, no, Liff, is not a typo) Douglas Adams and John Lloyd assign highly creative definitions to place names. Their definition for Tegucigalpa is a perfect example of a ‘gaffe.’
In “The Meaning of Liff,” Tegucigalpa (noun) is defined as “An embarrassing mistake arising out of confusing the shape of something rather rude with something perfectly ordinary when groping for it in the darkness.
A common example of tegucigalpa is when a woman pulls a packet of Tampax out of her bag and offers them around under the impression that it is a carton of cigarettes.”
That is a gaffe. What Labout is doing is anything but.
So when Joseph Muscat said that the contract is yet to be signed, and after ten seconds he said that it was signed, is that considered a gaffe?