mordaunt

Though he tried to reassure his target audience of those uncomfortable with his odd background by saying his father came from Kenya NOT the Middle East, he failed by his almost mordaunt pronunciation of Pakistan and Taliban and IIRC, Al-"Kayda".

Let's compare the candidates' post-debate ads. Ann Althouse 2008

It was not his good fortune to discover, as in the preceding generation William Shakspeare discovered, a mordaunt 'or common base of both, and in which both the poetic and the philosophical power blended in one.

The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Henry Nelson Coleridge 1820

Metre, therefore, having been connected with poetry most often and by a peculiar fitness, whatever else is combined with metre must, though it be not itself essentially poetic, have nevertheless some property in common with poetry, as an intermedium of affinity, a sort, (if I may dare borrow a well-known phrase from technical chemistry), of mordaunt between it and the super-added metre.

Biographia Literaria Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1803