So punny, I almost forgot to laugh
Alright, I admit it. I love a pun, even if they are possibly the most maligned type of humor known to man. So when I happened upon an op-ed piece on puns by Joseph Tartakovsky in today’s New York Times, I couldn’t help but stop and read.
Wordle me this
I have a new favorite toy. For the next few minutes, anyway. It’s called Wordle, and it takes any website or blog that has an RSS feed and makes into visual art. Kind of like a word collage. You can click here to see my Wordle of today’s Daily Beast.
My recommendation is to tread your Wordle to yourself. If you do, it sounds kind of like bad beat-era or open mic poetry. Or the ravings of a paranoid schizophrenic. Take your pick.
The march to one million
According to the Global Language Monitor, on April 29th, 2009, the English language will pass one million words (and we wonder why English is considered so difficult to learn?). The GLM is a service based out of Austin, Texas, that “documents, analyzes and tracks trends in language the world over, with a particular emphasis upon Global English.” According to the GLM website, “English has become the first truly global language with some 1.35 billion speakers as a first, second or auxiliary language.” Who knew?
If you’re a betting person, have some fun by checking out HubDub.com, which bills itself as “the web’s news forecaster.” At HubDub, you can bet (with play money) on when you think the millionth word will make its appearance, and how strongly you feel about that prediction. Good times.
And just so you know, before you go setting up a One Millionth Word party on Evite, the English language actually has no authority that approves new words. According to The Economist’s John Grimond, “…by what authority does the Global Language Monitor say a new coinage is a genuine new word? None. Some countries, such as France and Spain, have academies that claim the right to regulate their national languages, and to repel invasive terms, usually from English. Neither England nor the United States attempts such an exercise in futility. English is a mongrel language that keeps its vitality by absorbing new words, uses and expressions. It promiscuously plunders other languages and delights in neologisms. It is the language of free traders and inventive entrepreneurs such as the staff of the Global Language Monitor.”
Pretty cool, and so very American.
…and don’t let the door hit you on the butt on the way out
The 34th annual Lake Superior State University List of Words to Be Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness was released on Tuesday, 12/30. As usual, the list doesn’t disappoint. This year’s it even contains its first-ever emoticon.
If you don’t know how this list is created, words are nominated by people all over the country, not just the students of the small university in the UP (that’s Upper Penninsula, to you non-Michiganders) of northern Michigan. This year, 15 words were selected from a pool of 5000 nominations.
Some of my personal favorites include:
- Main Street/Wall Street
- Maverick
- First Dude
- Use of the word “Monkey” as a suffix, an example would be if I had named my company “CopyMonkey” instead of “CopyFire.” Says Rogier Landman of Sommerville, MA, “Especially on the Internet, many people seem to think they can make any boring name sound more attractive just by adding the word ‘monkey’ to it.” Rogier, I can’t say I’ve noticed this trend being as rampant as the overuse of “Main Street” but, dagnabbit, I am not going to say I disagree. Monkeys are awesome, but their use as a suffix is certainly suffering from overkill, even if it did take you pointing it out for me to become personally annoyed by it.
In honor of the annual list, I would like to offer up a few words/phrases of my own that I would like to banish:
- Irregardless (what?)
- Low-hanging fruit (just gross. I’m sorry, this is an idiot phrase.)
- Deck (when referring to a PowerPoint presentation)
- Bandwidth (when referring to the amount of resources available)
- Impactful (again, what?)
- Touch base (when used to refer to a meeting, or to the need to follow up on something later)
- Extreme (as in anything prefaced with the word. Extreme poker, bobsledding, baseball, boxing, foosball, whatever. Everything is extreme now. Boooorrriiiinnnggggg.)
And that’s all from me for 2008. Happy New Year, everyone!
Love is a menu splendid thing
Australian newspaper The Age featured an article today (or is it tomorrow? They’re hours ahead of us, so…hm. Never mind. It’s in their 12/23 edition.) covering two of my most favorite things. Words and menus. I am a menu addict. I’m the type of person you don’t want tagging along with you to any big city, but NYC in particular. I will stop in front of every restaurant I walk past, scanning for a menu display on an outside wall, so I may then stand there in food rapture, memorizing every word of each glorious dish. The language of food is so rich and diverse that hundreds of books have been written simply to translate for the rest of us just what the heck it all means. You may have noticed, menus are becoming more and more complicated, and beginning to read a bit like bad poetry. And that’s where The Age comes in with their article, “Mincing words.”
The article is essentially a call to bring back the days of simple menus, with descriptions that don’t read like haiku, and are easy to understand even for someone who has never spent even five minutes with The Food Network and Alton Brown (who I happen to love, love, love, but the man does get very wordy and technical. It’s Alton’s world, I’m just living in it). I agree. There’s a way to write a beautiful menu and create amazing dishes without consulting the Oxford English Dictionary (Unabridged). I feel this change would allow the customer to choose a simple bowl of soup without developing a migraine in the process.
One last note:
The final tragedy of ridiculous menus is the 10-minute parade of specials that spews forth from the waiter before even having the opportunity to dull the pain with a cocktail. What a way to ruin the conversational flow. If I want to stop conversation in its tracks, I usually just do it the old-fashioned way. By getting a huge wad of spinach stuck in my front teeth. Here’s to tradition!
Because no one ever wants a moist nugget
In surfing the internet, looking for lists of the most hated words, I found a few that were pretty phenomenal, which I will link to below. My reason for this type of focused internet searching is due to the fact that I feel an uprising is needed to have all of the major publishers remove certain words like “moist,” “nugget,” and “panties” from their dictionaries (Oxford? American Heritage? Do we have an understanding?).
While I’m on the subject of words that generate anxiety or distaste, I’ve noticed lately there are many other words so consistently incorrectly pronounced, it’s all I can do to not run screaming from the room, ears covered, singing “La la la la laaaaa!” to block out the offense (see also: supposably [supposedly], athalete [athlete]). Other nausea-inducing mispronunciations include: “Wash” pronounced as “Warsh,” “Milk” pronounced as “Melk,” “Interesting” pronounced as “Inneresting,” and of course, “Nuclear” pronounced as “Nu-Q-Lur.”
Finally, one regional bit of scary that I’ve run into since moving to Ohio (”Ohiah” if you’re from an hour or more south of Columbus) is the odd choice to omit in speech the “to be” from certain phrases. It makes my hair stand on end. The best and most-used example of this would be “needs done,” as in “Honey, the wash needs done.” I’m getting a chill just typing it. I don’t know how these two short but important words disappeared from the English language around here, but someone needs to find them and bring them back before my head explodes.
But I digress.
I give you…some lists!
Wordie’s Corporate Buzz Words and Phrases
If you’re on Facebook, you can join the I Hate the Word Moist group. (I have to be honest, I am tempted to go and sign up right now.)
