- By Jim Evans
- Entertainment
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Smart TalkSMART TALK By Dr. Ced Riley
INVITED GUEST: The staff at the Institute for the Linguistically Impaired chuckles when our local Underbelly, Texas, hostelry, the Hotel Inn, calls its customers "guests." "Guest" is obviously a euphemism for "customers." In southern England's Cornwall, the locals have an especially accurate local term for tourists: "victims."
A guest is someone you've invited in to entertain for a time at no charge. Saying invited guest is as redundant as saying free gift.
Uninvited guest and the TV term guest host are oxymorons. An uninvited guest is, after all, an intruder, a gate crasher, or a party crasher. The term probably began as a joke and gained acceptance by the linguistically impaired, like a little bit pregnant.
And a permanent guest host on a TV show is a logical impossibility. Jay Leno had to endure that label years ago on The Tonight Show. If he were a language scholar like George Carlin, he would have ridiculed it to death immediately.
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