Monday, January 14, 2013

George Jonas: A few Pro Tips on Word Usage for Unsophisticated Amateurs

This is a beauty.

Read the whole thing.

"A friend wanted to know if I could think of a word whose meaning has completely changed during my lifetime. He needed it for an academic paper. “Give me,” he said, “a word that meant one thing when you first heard it, but means something completely different today.”

So it got me thinking about the words that I can't stand-some that have "changed" in meaning and some that are just so barfy that they make me roll my eyes and vomit.

One of the worst words is "safe".

"Safe schools", "safe space", etc...Please shut up already. Thank you. I will keep myself and my kids safe. Please butt out of my life.

Another one is "positive". This is meant to advertise that the place that you are in is friendly to gays, lesbians, transpeople, and what have you. As if there is any place that really isn't friendly to homosexual people, and as if any place should care about who you bonk. As if I care when I patronize a place, what the owner or director's opinion is about other people's sexual proclivities. Guess what. I don't really care.

In no particular order, here are a few other ones that I hate:

Holistic, forward-thinking, the use of "inform" to mean affecting an agenda as opposed to "inform" as in to transfer information, stimulus (this is wasteful government spending of our money) and the list goes on.

And "gay" just used to mean geeky or uncool when I was a kid. Like if your mom wanted to come and teach a ballroom dance class at your school, you would roll your eyes and say BUT MOMMMMMY THAT IS SOOOOOO GAYYYYYYYYYY. 

But you can't say that anymore. How gay is that???!?!?

But "safe" is the worst.

Do you have others? I'll post a collection of responses.