Chobulous wrote: ↑Wed Jan 25, 2023 9:19 am
I hate it when words are used completely out of context just because the poster has heard it used by some knobhead pundit or sports journalist. Turgid is not a word that can be applied to a style of football. It means swollen or distended.
Rant over
I've heard the word 'turgid' used so often in football that it practically has assumed a meaning in the context of football that is synonymous with 'crap' or 'shite'. It shares the structural unit, /tur/, with the word 'turd', and I reckon this is where the association comes from:
turd=
turgid. The meaning that the poster was attempting to communicate was clear enough for you to recognise the incorrect use of the word turgid (by the poster, and as you point out, by pundits), and an awareness of its misuse presupposes an understanding of the intended meaning to such a degree that I suspect you might be able to suggest a more 'correct' word to use, so what is the problem, truly, beyond bugbearing pedantry?
Nobody reading this thread could read a sentence like, "the football Dyche played was turgid," and not understand it to mean, "the football was horrible." Most people certainly aren't going to read it and become horribly confused, wondering how distention could relate to this context, not least because anyone with a reading comprehension sufficient to recognise, 1. the incorrect use of the word 'turgid', 2. that 'turgid' describes something which is distended, and 3. the meaning of the word distended itself — such a person would usually be literate to the point that they are beyond caring for tedious prescriptive linguistics, and would almost certainly be forgiving in understanding the intention in the use of the word. Your problem is not necessarily the communicability of the poster, so what is it, apart from stuffy old conservatism? My suspicion is that this is not about language; you simply disagree with their appraisal of Sean Dyche, and you wouldn't have pulled up anyone who misuses the word in a defence of Dyche.
