- By Jim Evans
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Smart TalkSMART TALK by Dr. Will S. Sert
MITIGATE AGAINST: Codgers (not old codgers) remember Archie Bunker, the TV comedy character who looked dumb and close minded at the time but has become a model for today's cable news personnel. Unfortunately, he lives on in many of my patients at the Institute for the Linguistically Impaired, who often pretend to work as public servants. Let's just say they fill political offices.
These toilers for our taxes often propose action that will mitigate against some undesirable tendency. Mitigate against is worthy of Archie Bunker because it's wrong on two counts before we even debate the rightness of the action.
First (not firstly), mitigate against is redundant. Mitigate already means to make less severe. Against is no more necessary than mental before telepathy.
Second, mitigate is usually the wrong word, anyway, so it becomes a malapropism in the greatest Archie Bunker/Dan Quayle/George W. Bush tradition. Mitigate against isn't as funny as consorting for immortal purposes, but it'll have to do in these scary times.
The expression my patients probably intend is militate against. That means to counteract, or operate against.
Many of them can't understand the distinction, and I train them to stick to plain words they understand, much as soldiers aren't allowed to handle weapons they haven't qualified for.
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