More intellectual nitpicking:
- This morning on the Metro I was reading Express, the free, “lite” version of the Post (when they first started publishing it last year I told myself it wasn’t worth reading, but hey, I get bored sometimes), and one AP report back in the entertainment section speculated on additional Harry Potter books following Harry into adulthood, and ran under the headline “Boy Wizard to Become Warlock?” Now I’m no sci-fi/fantasyologist, but isn’t there some odd taxonomical leap there? Doesn’t “warlock” imply some kind of evil? (Chime in here, Thom et al.) I don’t think that’s what they wanted to imply, but who knows.
- Just now I was reading an article online which mentioned the White House AIDS czar, and I’m wondering how and why these types of policy positions ever came to be called “czar“? Like “drug czar,” who on the national level is the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, and so forth. Yes, I know this current American usage has been around for a while (I remember first hearing it in the Reagan days), but as a political term doesn’t it just seem a little strange even for informal use?
One reply on “Word police”
Yes, “warlock” generally denotes an evil practitioner of “black” magic. Its etymology is Middle English for “oathbreaker.” It always bothered me in Bewitched, too, when the male witches were called warlocks there as well; familiarity with that series may be why the author of the article used the term.