Is Romney a Wazzock?

It is, for me, always a delight to learn a new word.

The news media on both sides of the pond have been full of stories about impolitic things said by U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney concerning the 2012 Olympics being held in London.  Romney has been traveling overseas in an effort to demonstrate that he is comfortable with international relations.

Although Americans have consistently shown that they are far more concerned about the domestic economy than anything else (recall the 1992 Clinton tag line, "It's the economy, stupid!"), especially when the economy isn't doing so well, we do expect a president to have some foreign policy "credentials," and without them we worry that our head of state might be viewed as a bumbling twit by our allies or as having exploitable weaknesses by our enemies.

Recently Mitt Romney has been on a trip labeled with one of my favorite oxymoronic terms in electoral politics: a "charm offensive." The objective is to get foreign leaders to take a liking to him and say nice things about him.  This is important, because one of the major advantages President Obama has over Romney (or anyone else) is that he is well-liked in the international community, and has been since his candidacy in 2008.  One may question how useful those sentiments have been to American foreign policy endeavors, but intuition suggests it can't hurt.

So why on earth would Romney question anything about the London Olympics, except perhaps how many medals Michael Phelps might add to his collection? To suggest that there might be something imperfect about security measures that have been implemented, or worse - much worse - that Londoners may not enthusiastically embrace their role as hosts of the Games cannot do anything but alienate the people he is trying to impress.

Referring to Romney's "charm offensive," a British newspaper called him "offensive" and said he was "devoid of charm."  And then the word that caught my eye: the writer for the Daily Mail who thus criticized Romney also said he is a "wazzock."

From 1966 to 1999 William F. Buckley had a television program called "Firing Line," full of spirited intellectual discussion of what would now be called "hot topics" in public affairs.  Beginning in 1971 this program was an hour long and ran on PBS, and nary an episode was missed in my household.  One of the things I really liked about the show was that Buckley was very attentive to the careful selection of words and had an impressive vocabulary.  He would never choose a word familiar to his viewers if there was an unfamiliar one that meant exactly what he wanted to say.  And so he sent me scurrying to the dictionary quite often.

I suspected "wazzock" was the sort of word I might find in my copy of Samuel Johnson's dictionary of insults, but for the sake of convenience I first consulted the New Oxford American Dictionary that resides in my Mac.  The meaning: a stupid, annoying person.  Origin 1980s, informal, British.  Not very satisfying, but likely correct.  When I consulted my mini-OED (the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, a wonderful compromise for those who cannot or will not commit to the many-volumed full-fledged OED), which has a publication date of 1993, there it was, with the same definition, and the notation "origin unknown." My older dictionaries had no "wazzock."  Oddly enough, neither did the latest edition of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, published in 2000.  (Even their online version came up empty.)  So "wazzock" is apparently not part of British slang that has caught the attention of American lexicographers.

Surely this means that an American wazzock would not grasp the insult, at least not without consulting the right dictionary.  No doubt the writer for the Daily Mail knew this and liked the sense of irony.

But does the insult fit?  Romney headed up the operations of the Olympics when the games were held in Salt Lake City.  Surely he thinks he, and everyone who worked with him, did a great job.  He may even think they did a better job than anyone else ever had or ever will.  He clearly is a believer in "American exceptionalism."  His 2010 book is titled No Apology: The Case for American Greatness.  A good friend of mine recently posted a quotation from the book online:

England is just a small island. Its roads and houses are small.  With few exceptions, it doesn’t make things that people in the rest of the world want to buy. And if it hadn’t been separated from the continent by water, it almost certainly would have been lost to Hitler’s ambitions.

Romney believes the United States of America is the greatest country in the world.  Fine.  So do most of the people who live here.  (If you want a citation, too bad.  I just made that up, and I think it's an accurate appraisal of public opinion, but I have no survey data to support it.)

But this is truly a gaffe.  Why would he say such things about the Brits when he is supposed to be on a "charm offensive?"  I'm afraid the answer is self-evident: he is a wazzock.