posted: November 1, 2001
edited: May 5, 2005
OK, the best damned holiday of the year is over and I am ready to rant.
I have had enough!
Ain't no such word as "burglarized," folks. The word for having burglary practiced upon one's stuff is burgled. A burglar burgles while committing burglary. He is not a burglarizer who burglarizes while burglarizing. Read! The! Dictionary! (And I mean the OED, the real dictionary of the English Language, not some Johnny-cum-lately bullshit.)
A butler butles, a burglar burgles. Technically, the trade a butler plies while he is butling is Butlery. If one is a Bugger, one commits buggery by buggering. One does not buggerize. Holy Hell! That sounds like something they do in old-fashioned dry cleaning shops. "One hour cleaning and buggerizing...."
Here's another misused word: decimate. "The entire squadron was decimated!" Well, ok... that's not nice: ya lost 1.2 planes. But that's hardly a screaming tragedy in a war. Just look at the fuckin' word: deci-mate. See that bit in the front? Looks like "decimal"? Same root, folks. Decimate means to lose one part in ten. It's something the Romans did as punishments to legions who defied them or did something frowned upon. They lined the men up and started counting heads. Every tenth guy was shoved out of line and killed. If what you want is a word meaning that everyone was killed, why not use the phrase wiped out or obliterated? If you want to say they were all killed in some remorseless and horrible fashion, why not say slaughtered to a man, or annihilated? Those are much nastier-sounding terms. Do we have to sound like we're talking computer-ese all the time? "They were destroyed!" Yes, yes, much better.
And for my friend Sharon: she was never anyone's "mentee" no matter how much they may want to say so. The act of mentoring requires that a mentor instruct and support a.... protegé. Not a bleeding, endangered sea-mammal! (Whoops, no that would be a manatee, but you get the point.)
"Irregardless" shall be stricken. It is redundant. What does it mean? "Without reference to"? That's what regardless means, so why do we need an extra syllable? Unless you mean that this is without reference to that which is without reference, in which case, we're all going back to math class to go searching for irrational numbers. And I know you don't want to do that.
Yes, I know a living and vital language changes with time, but some things are just silly. When you have a delightful, elegant word like burgle why muck it up with a syllable that makes it sound illiterate and clunky?
I was in a restaurant recently and one of the waitresses was checking her homework. "Is pled a word?" she asked.
Everyone else said they thought not, that the word she wanted was pleaded. Nope. Pled is the word. "He pled guilty." It is the past-tense of plead, just as fled is the past-tense of flee. Isn't that a perfect, compact word? You rarely hear it anymore, in preference to the "regularized" word pleaded but it really should be back. It does the job with such aplomb.
But then, I'm the person who feels we should re-instate octopi, indices, foci and shoen instead of "octopusses", "indexes", "focuses" and "shoes". (Of course, I lisp, so that may be part of the reason I prefer these words.)
I also vote for the currently non-word coolth which should be the equivalent of warmth for the opposite end of the temperature scale. There just is no word for it, currently, and there ought to be. That's where the coinage of new words (or re-acceptance of old ones) ought to be: making for more lovely language.
English is such a versatile language with so many wonderful words that are falling by the wayside as the barely literate or condescending jerk-offs in the media and even in schools attempt to "regularize" it to death.
I don't want to speak a "regular" language: I want to speak English!
posted: November 23, 2001
It's a rubber hamster, wearing white cuffs, collar and bow-tie a'la Chippendale's and when I press its left foot it waggles its head and wiggles its arms to the tune of "Just a Gigolo". It is my first Christmas present.
Why are Americans so holiday-hungry? We just get one over with and we're gearing up for the next. Thanksgiving wasn't over for 8 hours before the "first official shopping day of the Christmas Season" was in full swing.
I like Thanksgiving, well enough. Why do we have to rush through it? We got three weeks after Halloween to digest the candy. And it's over a month until Christmas. Ever get to feeling like Thanksgiving has become the stop-gap holiday? Just a food-thing wedged in between the dress-up and the Big One.
I'm not even Christian of any stripe, but I still say "Christmas". I tried saying "winter holiday" or solstice or whatever, but it just didn't stick. I can't make my mouth fit around Kwanza without feeling weird about it and, I'm only an honorary Yid, so I really can't say Hanukkah with authority. I can't even spell it, right. (Does this mean I lose my honorary status, Mrs. Gassner? Can I still come over for Kuegel anyhow?)
And why a turkey? I know we are told that the wild turkey was a staple of the local indian diet, but I've seen wild turkeys and I'm reasonably sure that the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth Colony was not celebrated with a roasted one. They are far too smart to let a bunch of mealy-mouthed protestants with sticks up their butts sneak up on them and shoot them. The only reason the indians caught them was that they'd been around a long time and had figured out where the local turkey bar was and then hung around outside until the drunken turkeys came outside to stagger home, then tripped them, mugged them and knocked them over the head. This is the origin of the whiskey "Wild Turkey".
Ben Franklin wanted the Turkey for the national bird, since it is wily and proud and kind of an obnoxious loner, which is pretty much what Americans are like. Franklin objected to the bald eagle, which, he pointed out, is usually a scavenger and a terrible coward.
So we sit down and eat the poor turkey every year in honor of the coming Christmas Shopping Season (or as far as I can tell that's what we're doing). I think it is a plot to get us all to sleep through the whole thing.
That might be why there are always leftovers: more chances to fall asleep.
And just when you've finally done away with the last of the benighted bird, along comes Christmas and what do they try to serve you?
Turkey.
It must be the government: they just want us fat and asleep.
Meanwhile, the retailers are fighting back with the advent, post-Thanksgiving, of the Dancing Santa, chase lights and Christmas Carols. Things which make enough noise and flash lights at us to keep us awake from our turkey-induced haze.
It's an on-going battle between the powers of commercialism and complacency.
No wonder I just totter through the holidays in a daze: I'm high on Turkey and in a state of near-epilepsy from the flashing lights.
But I fooled them this year: we had salmon, instead. Now, I'm just fishy. And still dazed.
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