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SMART TALK: Mitigate Against |
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by Jim Evans
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Friday, 02 May 2008 |
 SMART TALK
by Dr. Will S.
Sert
MITIGATE AGAINST: Codgers
(not old codgers) remember Archie
Bunker, the TV comedy character who looked dumb and close minded at the time
but has become a model for today's cable news personnel. Unfortunately, he lives on in many of my
patients at the Institute for the Linguistically Impaired, who often pretend to
work as public servants. Let's just say
they fill political offices.
These toilers for our taxes often propose action that will mitigate against some undesirable
tendency. Mitigate against is worthy of Archie Bunker because it's wrong on
two counts before we even debate the rightness of the action.
First (not firstly),
mitigate against is redundant. Mitigate already means to make less
severe. Against is no more necessary than mental before telepathy.
Second, mitigate
is usually the wrong word, anyway, so it becomes a malapropism in the greatest
Archie Bunker/Dan Quayle/George W. Bush tradition. Mitigate against isn't
as funny as consorting for immortal purposes,
but it'll have to do in these scary times.
The expression my patients probably intend is militate
against. That means to counteract,
or operate against.
Many of them can't understand the distinction, and I train
them to stick to plain words they understand, much as soldiers aren't allowed
to handle weapons they haven't qualified for.
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v4i17
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