Not Far from the Tree

"Okay, so I know I was in the wrong and I said I was sorry for blocking the intersection, but hey, you don't need to use the F-word in front of your little girl."  I said, but she didn't hear me through the window.  I didn't actually hear what she said except for the F-word as she practically spat it into my front windshield.  That's exactly where this stuff comes from; young kids using language that will melt paint as they walk down the street.  This is aside from the fact that she is probably not an upstanding citizen of society in her own right, but I am sorry for her offspring.  Her little girl is bound to be part of the group of children schooled in the ways of street life and sounding like it.

So maybe I am old fashioned.  I try not to curse, I take care with the language that comes out of my mouth, and I expect my son to so the same.  Yeah, well maybe that last part is a little hard to do, but I do get on him when I hear him talk like that.  I am fortunate in that my husband is not the type to swear also.  It makes you sound so...common.

Good language is hard to come by these days.  I am not talking about big words and a polished accent, I am talking about everyday speech and the absence of the F-bomb being dropped every other word. It seems as if it is lost in today's society. I don't care - it still highly offends me and I am sticking to that.  I can still hope, can't I?

Amen!

An editorial appeared in our local paper which pretty much echos my thoughts. It addresses one of my major pet peeves; swearing.  I grew up in household where swearing was frowned upon and my parents never uttered the f-word.  My mother would occasionally say "damn", but she never dropped the f-bomb. I suppose my father, a native of Mexico, didn't have those words in his vocabulary and if he swore in Spanish, I never knew it.

I don't know the reason it has peppered our day to day language, but I am not a fan of it.  It screams vulgar, commonplace, and ill-educated.  Maybe I am just showing my Main Line roots here, but I fail to see the reason for dropping the f-bomb in one's daily missives.

It's not that I am offended by the word - well maybe I am.  I get a kind of visceral feeling in my gut when I hear it, so maybe that's what offense feels like.  I must admit I occasionally drop it myself sometimes in times of extreme anger or frustration, but I feel very bad when that happens.  But overall I see no need for it, and I was really surprised - and refreshed that someone did a piece on it.  Thanks!

English as a Second Language

I am getting more and more frustrated in the way most people speak, or more accurately write, our native tongue here in America, and I am not convinced that it is because of text messages or email.  I don’t know what they are teaching in school these days, but whatever it is, it is NOT working.

So here is your English language lesson for the day:

The word ”lay” means to place or put an object on a surface.  It is also the past tense of the verb “to lie”.  The phrase “I am going to lay on the beach all day” is not the proper use of the word.  Chickens lay, humans lie. By the way, spell check gets this, which is really surprising considering the use it gets even by the press.

The word “YOUR” is the possessive form of the word YOU.  It may sound the same as the contraction of the word YOU and ARE as in YOU’RE, but it is not spelt the same and means two totally different things.  You write “You’re welcome”, not “Your welcome”.

There are three spellings for the word that sounds like the number 2.  The first spelling is for the number, written as “two”.  The second spelling is for the word meaning in direction toward, or “to”.  The third spelling is for the word the meaning in addition or in excess, or “too”.  We say “too much”, not “to much”.

Similarly there are three spellings and meanings for the word “there”.  “There” means to, into, or toward as in “run there”.  “Their” is the possessive for the word “they”.  “They’re” is the contraction for the two words “they” and “are”. You would write “they’re here”, not “their here” (even spell check gets that one, too).

Affect means to simulate or bring about a change.  Effect means something brought about by change – subtle difference, I know.  One writes “the effect of this appearance is due to the steps outlined in this program”, not “the affect of this change…”.  You could say “the program affects the appearance” if you wanted to use that word.

So there you have it.  Learn these five simple rules and you will sound like a college graduate and possibly impress your boss.  Or not.

Trending

Trending is the new way to determine if you are popular, so I understand.  The other night there was an episode of CSI which featured something like Twitter.  In the show, a fraternity at The University of Las Vegas had a party at which everyone tweeted things like “insane party”, “having a wonderful time”, and then of course since it was CSI, a murder.  One of the actors who played the son of the head of the CSI team was shown explaining trending to his Dad.  Incidentally, I looked online and actually found a site called WhatTheTrend.com which shows what is currently trending on Twitter. 

As with many words, trending is not an actual word but has evolved to be used to describe an online activity or event.  It is so well used that spell checker in Word does not display it as incorrect.  I looked it up in my American Heritage Dictionary from 1981 and the word does not exist.  But that’s how things are today.  Words are being created every day.  There are several sites online which describe and define new words in the English language and it is interesting because many of them I have never heard before.  Trending however, was not on several of the sites I looked at.  If you Google “trending” (Google being another made up word) there is a Wikipedia entry for Twitter in which the word appears.  According to that, the word appeared on Twitter in 2009 when Twitter created a column to show what topics were most popular.

I love learning the origin of words and in these days when words are being made up all the time it is a constant source of amazement when I see a new one.  The question is that as more words become part of our language, are the old words going to go away?  Interesting concept.

The English Language

I read an editorial a while back about people saying "oh my God!" and the writer thought it was very bad. He, being a Christian man, was highly offended. It never occurred to me that it could an objectionable expression. However, the other night I watched an episode of Extreme Makeover - Home Edition that feature a woman from Jamaica who had her house, and her whole neighborhood, renovated. At the end of the show she and her family got to go through the house and marvel at the transformation. They went running through the house and all the said was "oh my God!" over and over again whenever they went into the room for the first time. As I was watching, I thought about editorial I read. I wasn't necessarily offended by her outbursts, but after a few times, I really got tired of hearing it. It began to grate on my nerves so I changed the channel and turned my attention to something else.
My late step-father had his doctorate in English and would often remark that Americans by and large have a very limited vocabulary. He would say that there are so many words in the English language and we use about a tenth of them. Some of them aren't even in the proper dictionary! I think that he blamed the education system mostly, but he also lamented that people are just plain lazy.

It's hard to learn a new word. You have to remember the word, remember how to use the word properly, and then think about when to use that word again. When you write, you can always cheat and use the tools in your word processor to help you find another word in its place. But when you are speaking you have to remember that you already said that would and it's hard to not say it again. In a situation when excitement takes over, you are overwhelmed and your brain can get stuck on the same phrase over and over again. It's easy to become repetitive without realizing it. I suppose if one is more versed in their vocabulary, one might be able to vary one's speech. But in the heat of the moment one finds themselves blurting out the same expletive over and over again without thinking about it.

I often wonder about the origin of language. How did it grow from the simple utterances that the very early humans made? How did the early human realize that they had the ability to form words and decide that "milk", for example, means a white liquid that comes from mammals? I find it fascinating.