Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Journalist Alex Wagner on MS NOW a little while ago:

We are so beclowning ourselves

(The intensive Gen-X so is just a bonus; AW was born in 1977, and Gen-X is roughly 1965 through 1980)

That’s beclown ‘make a fool of’ (perhaps clumsily). With a modest number of cites to be found, but uncommon enough to strike many hearers as a colorful coinage.

On the prefix, from Michael Quinion’s Affixes site:

be-: This prefix has been productive in the past, but is rarely used to make new words today.

… Its main function has been to create transitive verbs, ones able to take a direct object, from nouns or adjectives: befoul, befriend, beguile, belittle, besiege, bewitch. [AZ: many items negative in connotation]

And then beclown.

This entry was posted on August 27, 2026 at 1:03 pm and is filed under Age, Connotation, Derivation, Lexical semantics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.