4.
– SINISTER BUTTOCKS?
ROGET WOULD BLUSH AT THE CRAFTY CHEEK
Middlesex lecturer gets to the
bottom of meaningless phrases found while marking essays
By Jack Grove
The academic who came across
baffling phrases such as “bequest mazes”, “Herculean liturgies” and “sinister
buttocks” in a student paper was left scratching his head for a while.
Then it dawned on him: it was the
product of what he now calls “Rogeting” – the creation of new meaningless
phrases through the thoughtless and ill-considered use of a Roget’s
Thesaurus, generally to hide plagiarised material.
Chris Sadler, principal lecturer
in business information systems at Middlesex University, suggested the neologism
after spotting several potential “Rogetisms” in a student’s piece of work.
After reading that “common mature
musicians [and] recent liturgy providers are looking to satisfy…Herculean
personalised liturgies”, Mr Sadler attempted to trace the sentence’s origin,
suspecting that the nonsense had been generated through extensive synonym
swapping.
“Even if the sentence had made
sense, it seemed out of place in [a paper on] business information systems and
I was motivated to seek out the source,” he said.
He eventually located the original
text, which read: “the current big players and new service providers are
looking to supply more powerful personalised services.”
Mr Sadler added that he had “seen
quite a bit” of “Roget-ing”, which he described as “disguising plagiarism by
substituting synonyms, one word at a time with no attempt to understand either
the source or target text”.
Other new phrases coined via the
splendidly inept process include “bequest mazes”, a rough translation of
“legacy networks”, a term used to describe web networks using outdated computer
formats.
To “stay ahead of the competition”
became the quaint “to tarry fore of the conflict”, while “new market leaders”
was turned into “modern store guides”.
Sadler’s favourite Rogetism,
however, is a rendering of the phrase “left behind”, which was marvellously
converted into “sinister buttocks”.
“This was a sad business for me
and especially [for] my student, but I do think ‘sinister buttocks’ deserves a
prize,” said Mr Sadler, who entered the student mistake for this year’s Times Higher Education
exam howlers.
In light of Mr Sadler’s
experience, any student tempted to deploy Roget’s Thesaurus in future
might well heed the counsel of horror writer Stephen King in his guide to good
writing.
“Any word you have to hunt for in
a thesaurus is the wrong word,” he advised, adding “there are no exceptions to
this rule”.
Note:
Behind the name: ‘Roget-ing’ describes the creation of absurd phrases
© 2014 by TSL Education Ltd