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A couple days ago U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt used the term "delicious conundrum" in what would seem to be the most inappropriate context. Here is the quote from the ABC News article (http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=2045194&page=2) where I saw it:
With local authorities in charge of the all-important distribution of medicines, how to prioritize who gets vaccine and treatment first? Who should go to the front of the line: the elderly, the sickest, the young, health-care workers or the military?
"This is a delicious conundrum," Leavitt said, acknowledging it was a "hard problem." He pointed out that any pandemic was likely to last about a year or a year and a half before it petered out. The country needs to be prepared to handle other disasters during that time too, Leavitt said.
I was not familiar with the term delicious conundrum and I about fell off my chair when I saw how it was used in the article. Apparently, as I found out by doing a Google search, Leavitt did not coin this term. I imagine its origin is some well-known work of literature. Does anyone know if this is true and if so, where it was first used?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Welcome, Frenchie. I can't answer your questions, but I agree that this is poor usage in this context.
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Pooh-Bah
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Wow it gets a lot of google hits for being such a weird phrase. Seems like it usually is used to mean a choice between two desirable but mutually exclusive options. ("New Yorker Nicole Krauss's second novel is ambitious on many levels, especially those of plot and character. It excels in all, presenting that delicious conundrum of whether to read quickly to devour the goodness or to read slowly to make the experience last longer.") Another source seems to use it to mean an odd or ironic situation: Larry Neal's hipster love lyric "Poppa Stoppa Speaks From His Grave" exemplifies the other pole of controversy. The poem begins, "Remember me baby in my best light, / lovely hip style and an." The concluding lines, however, include some very ancient and well-known Anglo-Saxon words which liberated black poets felt entitled by heritage to use--words that either delighted or enraged poetry crowds whenever one of us got up to read. It was a delicious conundrum of being avant-garde: African American poets censured for speaking Anglo-Saxon words!
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old hand
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Perhaps it was meant to evoke the idea that discussions as to who should receive vaccines would provide much political fodder, and that it therefore represents a 'delicious' problem.
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Carpal Tunnel
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I agree that it is an inappropriate usage. A better place to find the origin of the phrase would be the wordorigins forum. You have to register to post.
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addict
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Quote:
"This is a delicious conundrum," Leavitt said, acknowledging it was a "hard problem." He pointed out that any pandemic was likely to last about a year or a year and a half before it petered out. The country needs to be prepared to handle other disasters during that time too, Leavitt said.
Jus wondering, does anybody else interpret this statement as "The military will be some of the first to get the vaccine"?
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Pooh-Bah
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Allowing "delicious" to mean delightful, and supposing that people like Leavitt actually take pleasure in such problems; still, is the expression not literally accurate
Last edited by dalehileman; 06/10/06 02:57 PM.
dalehileman
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I would propose that 1) a "delicious conundrum" should mean one in which all the potential solutions are delightful, and 2) it was definitely inappropriate in the original citation. Perhaps the author meant "delicate" rather than delicious?
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Carpal Tunnel
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yup, poor usage.
but what do you expect?
formerly known as etaoin...
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The word delicious, according to the OED, has a secondary meaning of intensely amusing or entertaining, which is obviously what the author intended with the phrase "delicious conundrum." A "pretty question" would be a close equivalent. Nothing inappropriate, so far as I can tell. whenever I''ve seen delicious usedthis way I've had the feeling that there was in implication of a certain amount of irony on the part of the author.
TEd
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I disagree. there is nothing amusing or entertaining about not having enough to go around. a delicious conundrum only works (for me) if the choioces are all good, and I can't decide which good thing to take.
formerly known as etaoin...
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That ain't the point. It is a delicious conundrum simply because of its complexity and the great ethics questions involved therewith. Do we dose the health care providers first, even if doing so means there are no patients for them to provide health care to? If you have a cholice between giving the elderly or giving the young first access to the immunizations, which one comes first? The elderly are ll gonna die anyway, while the younger and healthier ones may have a greater chance of survival on their own. Do we give the first shot at the drugs to the military so they can be there to protect the survivors from themselves when anarchy reigns?
The speaker chose those words correctly, though perhaps not in PC terms since the phrase is not well-known.
It's actually more a technical term when you get right down to it.
If you google the phrase in quotes you will find a bunch of citations almost all along this line.
TEd
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I'm still with eta on this one. Whatever secondary meanings "delicious" might have they will be overshadowed by the normal meaning, particularly in this context.
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> secondary meaning of intensely amusing or entertaining, which is obviously what the author intended
> complexity and the great ethics questions
I still don't see how that is amusing or entertaining.
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look at it from the backside: those are very perplexing conundrums that TEd has posited, and someone who thus takes amusement from them [how droll!] might consider them "delicious".
-joe (what, me worry?!) friday
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stranger
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I want to thank everyone who answered. I still don't know the origin of the phrase, but I haven't tried wordorigins.com yet.
I understand Ted's point of view but I do not think it can possibly be appropriate to use the word delicious in the context of choosing who lives or dies, regardless of the technical accuracy or historical precedence that disassociates the adjective delicious from the nature of the conundrum. What percentage of the population could possibly grasp this subtlety?
The secretary of HHS should have more sensitivity to the level of education and erudition of his audience, myself included apparently.
Now if G.W. Bush had been in the audience, I imagine that he would have chastised Leavitt for talking about flavored prophylactics in public.
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formerly known as etaoin...
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One last attempt: see also delicious irony.
TEd
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well, seems as if we're getting into schadenfreude...
formerly known as etaoin...
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Quote:
One last attempt: see also delicious irony.
Choose one:
A) Jeffery Dahmer dies by falling into a sausage making machine. It is not discovered until after the sausages are served up at a policemen's picnic.
2) Jimmy Carter dies choking on a peanut.
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mmmmm, mmmmm. that is delicious on so many levels. Sponsored by: Jimmy Dean sausages
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The cynical view would be that it was probably a case of knee-jerk phrase selection, from having heard it before vice actually thinking about what it means (or should mean). It does sound flaky in that context, and not like pie crust. As such it would fall in with the now hackneyed television favorite "amazing". 
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OTOH, it might could have been an automatic spelling correction for a typoed "delicate."
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formerly known as etaoin...
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Welcome aBoard, Don! Thanks for posing this one--I always enjoy good discussion threads.
I'm standing with Ted on this one. Delicious modifies conundrum in this phrase. However, given what the conundrum referred to is, I agree with Faldage that it will be overshadowed by the normal meaning , and therefore am of the opinion that Mr. L. shouldn't have used it.
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> Delicious modifies conundrum in this phrase.
guess I need to read more carefully. I didn't know we were arguing about that.
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Interesting. Very interesting. And you have all of you including me been looking at the wrong word.
The use of conundrum to mean a difficult question is, at best, quite new. Here's from one online dictionary:
1. A kind of riddle based upon some fanciful or fantastic resemblance between things quite unlike; a puzzling question, of which the answer is or involves a pun. 2. A question to which only a conjectural answer can be made.
The phrase delicious conundrum revolves around the sense of delicious I set forth above in conjunction with definition 1 above for conundrum. I have seen this occasionally over the years and had it explained to me by my father when I was a lad of very tender years. I distinctly remember, though it was almost a half century ago, the "discussion" we had about using delicious this way. I do wish I could remember what I was reading that brought the phrase to mind, but it must have been the more "modern" usage because our discussion was about the first word, not the second.
The usage quoted at the start of this thread is incorrect insofar as its use to describe a tough question. That use of the word conundrum is not reflected in my OED Compact Edition (the entire OED in reduced print format), though it is set forth in that fashion in the online Compact OED available through onelook.com.
TEd
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I would say we're looking more at def 2 for conundrum.
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Quote:
Interesting. Very interesting. And you have all of you including me been looking at the wrong word.
The use of conundrum to mean a difficult question is, at best, quite new. Here's from one online dictionary:
1. A kind of riddle based upon some fanciful or fantastic resemblance between things quite unlike; a puzzling question, of which the answer is or involves a pun. 2. A question to which only a conjectural answer can be made.
…
The usage quoted at the start of this thread is incorrect insofar as its use to describe a tough question. That use of the word conundrum is not reflected in my OED Compact Edition (the entire OED in reduced print format), though it is set forth in that fashion in the online Compact OED available through onelook.com.
That section of the brick and mortar edition of the OED was published in May, 1893. Definition 2 in the AHD is appropriate to this usage and, I think, fits quite well. I don't see any problem with the use of the word "conundrum" here. I still don't think "delicious" is a good choice of words.
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I was surprised to see conundrum marked "Origin unknown"; OED comments, "Origin lost", although it has citations going wayback. they've got some updating to do on this one, to capture the more common usages noted here.
but I digress.
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Why 'origin lost' rather than 'origin unknown'? Did they use to know the origin but lost the slip of paper it was written down on?
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Quote:
...I still don't think "delicious" is a good choice of words.
Yes, it does appear to be in poor taste. 
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