Believe it or not, I’m lost for a word

Koala bears aren’t bears. Fun runs can hurt.

We call such things misnomers but I needed something else, a label to capture the sense of “despite calling this a thing, it’s not really the thing”.

The FIFA Peace Prize, say, is not a real thing. Or it is a thing but not an actual thing. Is there a word for that?

Fake lacks nuance. Travesty seems too loaded. What sits between bogus and authentic? Maybe a surrogate, a virtuality? No doubt German has a suggestion as the English lexicon seems bereft.

Two years ago Hugh Grant toasted (and roasted) writer-director Richard Curtis at the 15th Governors Awards in LA. When bestowing an honorary Oscar to Curtis, Grant added, “Would we call it an Oscar? It’s a kind of Oscar, isn’t it? It’s a better-than-nothing Oscar.” Nursing his figurine, Curtis quoted his son: it’s “an Oscar for people who never made a good-enough movie to win one”.

So, neither fake nor misnomer but a Clayton’s version of the claim: a quasi-Nobel, an almost-Oscar. An allegation. In a world of altered reality and unreliable narratives we crave this elusive label to identify a “like-thing” parading as The Real Thing.

Look at the Isle of Skye. Since the mainland bridge was built in 1995, successive Scottish governments have debated whether Skye has ceded its island status for being umbilically compromised by road. Meaning the island is not really an island, despite the fact it is an island in the true girt sense. Only Jonathan Swift could invent this stuff.

In tennis, Carlos Alcaraz is the youngest male to claim a career grand slam, despite a grand slam needing to occur across a calendar year. While still a triumph, the Spaniard’s slam is semantically relegated to a better-than-nothing slam. A sham-slam? A de-facto sweep?

In other sports, an asterisk marks a tainted accomplishment. Melbourne Storm, say, lost two NRL flags in hindsight, their on-field wins in 2006 and 2008 redacted due to salary breaches. There, in the archives, asterisks convert the actual into the adulterated.

English director Emerald Fennell tempered the fidelity of her Wuthering Heights with a set of inverted commas. The squiggles warn you against expecting the real McCoy, paving the way for Fennell’s real McCopy. Like the actual thing, but not quite.

So what do we call an X that’s a near-X but not a true-X? Perhaps a placeholder, a false flag, a wannabe, a Schrodinger’s category? Believe it or not, I’m lost for a word. To come full circle, calling such un-things misnomers would actually be a misnomer.

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