skewer » skew

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • On her newest album, Judy Tenuta: A Space Goddessy, she leaves no comic stone unturned, skewing everyone from Calista Flockhart (“there should be a law-you have to weigh more than the kid you adopt”) to the First Daughters (“the Bush twins-Heineken and Miller Light”). (NoHo>LA, May 9, 2002)
  • For obvious reasons, the retraction failed to mention that the reporter made up an entire skit skewing me. (Armstrong Williams, March 21, 2005)
  • wonderful recap, the only reason I want to Jon to stay around for a good long time is so you can keep on skewing him in the recaps. (Fans of Reality TV forum)
  • The blades go right through the monk’s kidneys, neatly skewing him. (Dranthur Vs Bruce Lee)
| link | entered by Ben Zimmer, 2005/03/21 |

Commentaries

  1. 1

    Commentary by Tom Neely , 2006/09/15 at 2:23 am

    And… You can look at this the other way around. People probably say, “skewered” when they mean, “skew,” more often than this orientation. We have some examples way back in the eggcorn “Contribute” files. It is not clear, looking into the OED, whether _skew_ and _skewer_ even come from the same word.

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