beclowning ourselves

Journalist Alex Wagner on MS NOW a little while ago: We are so beclowning ourselves (The intensive Gen-X so is just a bonus; AW was born in 1977, and Gen-X is roughly 1965 through 1980) That’s beclown ‘make a fool of’ (perhaps clumsily). With a modest number of cites to be found, but uncommon enough to strike many hearers as a colorful coinage. On the prefix, from Michael Quinion’s Affixes site: be-: This prefix has been productive in the past, but is rarely used to make new words today. … Its main function has been to create transitive verbs, ones able to take a direct object, from nouns or adjectives: befoul, befriend, beguile, belittle, besiege, bewitch. [AZ: many items negative in connotation] And then beclown.