Maybe I should write something about Mitt Romney and the gaffe.\n
First of all, what the hell is a gaffe<\/i>, anyway? And why does it have a silent e<\/i> on the end? What’s wrong with a good old-fashioned gaff? What are we, Frenchmen?\n
Well, gaffe<\/i> comes from the French, who evidently use it more or less the way we do, as (according to the OED an instance of clumsy stupidity<\/i>. I think it landed here in the bed created for it by the e-less gaff<\/i> as in blow the gaff<\/i>, to reveal a secret, or stand the gaff<\/i>, to, as the OED puts it, receive severe criticism. It’s possible that stand the gaff<\/i> and blow the gaff<\/i> are not actually connected, except in the sense that gaff<\/i> was loud and course talk, or possibly merry talk, all the same as guff<\/i> or gab<\/i>.\n
Anyway, I bring up stand the gaff<\/i> to point out that a gaffe, properly speaking, is not just a verbal blunder as one might think from a narrow definition, but anything that causes a strong negative reaction as if<\/i> it were a verbal blunder. Taegan Goddard’s definition over at his political dictionary<\/a> requires that it causes embarrassment, although he also requires that it be an unintentional statement, which I think is not necessarily the case. Was it a gaffe when Our Only Vice-President said that the Affordable Care Act was a big fucking deal<\/a>? Yes. Was it unintentional? Well, he didn’t mean for everybody<\/i> to hear it, so I suppose it wasn’t intentional in that sense, but was what he meant to say, and it was true, besides. Was it a gaffe when Senator McCain said that the fundamentals of the economy were sound<\/a>? Yes. But it was completely intentional. Was it a gaffe when Barack Obama said he had visited fifty-seven states? No, because nobody heard about it or cared. Was it a gaffe when Jessica Simpson told the Secretary of the Interior that she liked the way Secretary Norton had decorated the White House? Yes and no; it certainly wasn’t unintentional, exactly, and it’s hard to believe that she could have been embarrassed at that stage, but people did react to it with mockery and scorn.\n