Mishearing condemnation, literally and metaphorically

On the news last week, it was announced that Boris Johnson (UK Prime Minister) had accused Keir Starmer (leader of the opposition) of condemning the IRA (Irish Republican Army, who committed many violent acts in the Northern Ireland conflict in the second half of the 20th century, during some of which time Starmer worked there). 

The British government generally sees itself as in the right in this conflict, as neutral peacekeepers, and I'm not going to get into the politics of it because it's complicated and I don't quite see how an occupying nation can actually be neutral, but certainly the IRA in the 1980s and 90s is on the list of terrorist organisations and killed many civilians in brutal ways. I was therefore surprised to hear Johnson accusing Starmer of condemning them, not because I don't think he would condemn them, but because he accused him of it. 

To accuse someone means that you think they shouldn't have done the thing. Behold these examples of interactions between us and the dogs, in which the first two examples are bad things, and thus the kind of things you can be accused of, and the second two are good things, and so accusing someone of them is infelicitous: 

Arrow accused Blanquita of sitting on his tail.

Blanquita accused Arrow of taking up too much space. 

*Jim accused Blanquita of behaving very well. 

*Laura accused Arrow of walking nicely on his lead. 

So to accuse Starmer of condemning the IRA means that Johnson thinks (a) that Starmer has condemned the IRA and (b) that Starmer ought not to condemn the IRA. (b) is the surprising part, as noted above. It turns out that the newsreader misspoke (or I misheard) and the word was condone, which in fact means the exact opposite of condemn and is entirely consistent with the political relations and the implications of the word accuse. Starmer has asked him to retract the accusation; it rumbles on. 

From that literal misheard condemn to a condemnation of a mishearing. In a twitter thread, the conversation turned to prescriptivism and bugbears about speech, as it so often does if you talk about language on the internet. Someone I don't know complained about double superlatives like bestest and cited a song lyric that contains the double comparative more deadlier: The female of the species is more deadlier than the male. I only know of one song with that lyric and it's one I know very well because I absolutely loved the band as a teenager: it's 'The female of the species' by Space, and the lyric is The female of the species is more deadly than the male. I've double checked with google and everything. In the course of my checking I learnt that there is a Walker Brothers song called Deadlier than the male, but there's no 'more' in the lyric, so again, just a single comparative, not double. And I also learnt that the Space song is based on a Kipling line, which is, again, more deadly. So this Person on the Internet has managed to get annoyed by something that doesn't exist, which happens a lot when people get angry about so-called culture wars and also English usage (hey it's almost like in fact the language peeves are a proxy for their dislike of women, working class people and Black people), but it would really help people's blood pressure if they just didn't.