Spoken by a "man on the street" interviewee on Fox 11 News in reference to the upcoming Grammy Awards - "If Alicia Keyes doesn't win, it'll be a tragesty." It is not known if this was a mispronunciation of "tragedy" or "travesty" however this new metaplastic word could be defined as "an exaggerated or grotesque imitation of a disastrous event" (Isn't that what Grammy means in French?). Special thanks to metaplasm reader Sairam Suresh for submitting this metaplastic word.
Posted by Tim at February 27, 2002 09:22 AMWhile some people may simply mistake this for a real word, others have made it up themselves - personally, I've used it for years, and while it's a word that surely others have stumbled upon, I made it up from scratch at the time. In high school my brother and I were making fun of the news on TV and how they were always going on about how such-and-such bombing was a tragedy, how this public figure's downfall was a tragedy, how this figure's treachery was a travesty, how can the American people stand for all this, whine whine whine...and so I put the two together as the generic word for all things the news likes to whine on about.
Posted by: Margaret Bauer on December 19, 2003 05:54 PM