Duchess of divadom’s fatuous overload
It’s nice to see a descendant of Nelson Mandela’s trending in the global news, even if it’s in a story about how cross people are with Meghan Markle for telling the world that someone told her he experienced as much joy on her wedding day as he did on the day Mandela was released from prison.
If you watch the duchess of divadom’s Spotify broadcast, you might agree that she did not really compare herself to Madiba, but I do not recommend watching it because even hardened Meghanomaniacs might die of fatuous overload.
It is, if possible, even worse than the worst film ever made about royalty, Grace of Monaco, starring Nicole Kidman. When this car crash of a movie was released in 2014, it drew some of the best (as in entertaining) reviews ever written. The Hollywood Reporter called it “relentlessly middlebrow mush” and The Telegraph “a fantastically silly melodrama”. The Guardian described it as “a film so awe-inspiringly wooden that it is basically a fire risk”. The script, said Variety, was “agonisingly airless and contrived” and The Observer said it was “a scrap of tawdry tinsel that will mainly be remembered as the film that made the Monegasques blow a monegasket”.
Kidman is a wonderful actress but she was staggeringly awful as Princess Grace of the Grimaldis. Still, it’s fun for critics when a truly terrible film hits the screens. Maybe they should remake it with Meghan Markle in the leading role.
Meghan does not like being called a diva, as she shared in the same disastrous Spotify outing (which was almost as misguided as the infamous Oprah interview). Her idol Mariah Carey once called her a diva, she said, and this made her very unhappy.
“It was all going swimmingly, I mean really well, until that moment happened, which, I don’t know about you, stopped me in my tracks when she called me a diva ... I started sweating a little bit, I started squirming in my chair.”
At least she had the grace to explain to her audience what “swimmingly” means, but according to Mariah, Meghan misunderstood the meaning of “diva” in the context of their chat. She meant it as a compliment, and indeed that was the original meaning of diva, which comes from the Latin for “goddess”.
Until the 1900s, the only women who were allowed to be called divas were distinguished opera singers, also referred to as “prima donnas”, literally meaning “first ladies”.
Divas and prima donnas are not what they used to be. These days both are usually meant as insults, describing someone who thinks a little too much of herself and glides around a little too gaudily.
Meghan felt impugned. “Impugn”, says the Online Etymology Dictionary, comes from the Latin impugnare, meaning “to fight against, to attack, to assault”.
Impugn began to be used in English in the late 14th century and changed definition slightly to mean “attack by argument”.
Impugn, incidentally, is not the opposite of “expugn”. To expugn, from the Latin espugnare, originally meant “to capture”, but later turned violent and began to mean “to eradicate”.
One might think that expugn is simply an alternative spelling of “expunge” (to delete or blot out). Not so. The etymological root of expugn is pugnare, meaning “to fight” (“pugnacious” comes from the same punchy place), while the root of expunge is pungere, meaning “to prick” (because early lexicographers would literally prick holes around letters to be expunged by the typesetter).
One might also be forgiven for thinking that “pugilist” comes from a family of pugnacious expugners, but the fancy name for a boxer is also the pinheaded son of pungere.
Moving from petulant divas to their pets, the pug became a breed of miniature dog in 1749. Before that, “pug” was a form of endearment, probably from “puck”, which was a mischievous fairy before it found its way onto the ice hockey rink.
Impugnable, by the way, can mean either “liable to be assailed” or “that which cannot be assailed”. I’m not sure which one Meghan is, and there is no real point to all this pugnacious expugning of pugilists, except to prove that you can’t keep a good word expunged.