Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Words and Pseudo-Words

  Call me old-fashioned, but it seriously hurts my ears when I hear people misuse grammar and/or use non-words.  For instance, as I write this, there is a song on the internet radio called "Tequila Sunrise" by Fiji, a Hawaiian group.  In it, the crooner says that he wants to "coversate about love," and I cringe.  I cringe because "conversate" is not a word, at all.  Conversation is a noun & converse would be the verb form of the word, conversation.  Somehow someone used "conversate" in a, well, conversation & it spread like wildfire.  The same goes for "an historic" which gets used a lot in the media.  The newscaster will sometimes try to make up for the mistake by making the "h" in historic silent, which makes it all the more grotesquely obnoxious. 

   I suppose that in today's technology driven, Twitter focused society, it's more convenient to just type what you feel & hope that someone can understand it, but it's pretty inexcusable, especially when you're projecting these words to hundreds and maybe thousands of people.  There's a saying that goes "you are what you eat," but I don't think it's a stretch to say that you are also what you say.  The big difference is that people usually observe what comes out of your mouth before they get a chance to see what goes in it.

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