okay, so i watch Eureka. it’s filmed locally and, despite it’s awesome cheesiness, it’s just plain fun. it’s kinda nice to think about a town full of geniuses fully funded by the government to create anything they want. and, well, the actor who plays Sheriff Carter is freaking HOT (for a blond).
in this season’s episodes, a potentially evil female boss has come to town and is trying to make the experiments money-making in order to bring more cash back to the governmental coffers. in her quest for stream-lining and cost-efficiency, she’s been handing out “redactions” all over town, effectively firing half the staff at Global Dynamics – the company under whose umbrella most research in Eureka is done.
at first, i wondered about the word. i’d never heard it before. i didn’t think too long on it, though, just chalking it up to new corporate-speak i would try my best to ignore for as long as possible. then, today, in a blog post by my friend Andrea, she used the word and it got me curious because her usage was not what i’d have expected after the Eureka context had introduced me to it. what Merriam-Webster has to say about the word “redact” is:
Pronunciation: \ri-‘dakt\
Function: transitive verb
Etymology: Middle English, from Latin redactus, past participle of redigere
Date: 15th century
1: to put in writing : frame
2: to select or adapt (as by obscuring or removing sensitive information) for publication or release ; broadly : edit
3: to obscure or remove (text) from a document prior to publication or release
do you see anything in that definition to even remotely mean terminate employment? sometimes it bugs me how words get mucked up. then again, thanks to Gillian and a couple of talking dinosaurs, i learned that “fubsy” will be removed from the Collins dictionary. that will be a sad, sad day for the english language, that will.
Things are redacted from government documents all the time, and they were probably using the word in the context of items being redacted from the Global Dynamics budgets. A person could be “redacted” if their project was cut. Bad use of grammar, sure, but not entirely incorrect.
Until recently, I always said it “red-act” – I thought it was a result of some government program called the “red act” which required things to be blacked out. Yeah, it makes no sense, but I first encountered the word as a teen and the mental pronunciation stuck.
(I also still slip and call pounds “libs” when reading “lbs” out loud – what’s really funny is Gary does the same thing.)