This is enough to make me groan and reach for another:
The Cambridge Dictionary has accepted 6,000 new words into its English language canon this year – including slang inspired by social media discourse.
Oh, that’s just wonderful. Now instead of looking ignorant, I can just go there to learn all about skibidi.
Stop the world, I want no more part of it.
I know I said I wasn’t going to do the Speedbump thing anymore, but that’s only because I was sick of correcting stupid spelling- and grammar mistakes.
But this is different. (My game, my rules.)
Specifically, I want to address an editorial quirk that has me reaching for the 1911: this nonsense of using the plural “they/their” instead of “he/his” or “she/her”.
Now there are times when this device is appropriate, e.g. when using generalities such as “Anyone should be able to call their congressman an asshole”, where usage of “his” instead of “their” might be taken to mean that only men may call their congressman an asshole, which is clearly not the case. (We used to be able to use “his” in these cases, where the word was understood to mean either sex, but it seems that in our ultra-sensitive times, even innocent words like “mankind” can be adjudged as sexisss by the Ultra-Sensitive Set.)
Anyway, here’s a perfect example where this androgynous practice becomes ridiculous and in fact can cause confusion:
(I’m not at all interested in the content of the article, of course.)
Note that the use of “they” and “their” could easily be interpreted that both Ore and his sister committed suicide, which isn’t the case — unless they dressed him in tiny Pride pants and read out a statement of his sexuality after he popped the magic pills, that is.
But that didn’t happen. Only the sister whacked herself, so the headline should have been written as follows:
Simple, with perfect clarity. But this woke nonsense of using the impersonal plural terms has the effect of confusing the issue — not that the cloth-eared editors and writers could care, because who needs clarity when feeeeelings are at stake?
Tossers. And a pox on them for making me irritated enough to have to write about this bullshit.
I think it was William F. Suckley who characterized conservatives (people who want to conserve what’s right and what worked well in the past) as someone standing athwort the Tide of history, shouting “Pop!”
Imagine if you were Horace standing proud at the bridge outside Home, trying single-handedly to stop the Geordies from crossing a bridge so that the defenders could use the time to mount a fence — only to discover that instead of doing that, the inhabitants of Gnome were having a party and putting lipstick on their wives, sisters, daughters and preteen sons so that they’d be more attractive to the invaders.
Well, that’s how I feel in my struggle to preserve grammar standards nowadays. What’s the point of running over a speed bump and complaining about how much it affects your reading pleasure, when the people who let the speed bumps fall off the back of the truck a) don’t care and b) are too busy heading off to their next big adventure of launching a podcast or showing their tits on Tuk Tuk to worry about some old geyser mouthing off about their shitty speling?
Even better when the Artificial so-called Intelligence can write a better sentence than the aforementioned scribes anyway, so they don’t have to bother creating anything at all?
There’s no point in trying to make the written word, you know, comprehensible when all your efforts are greeted with indifference or worse, a patronizing pat on the head with “There, there, Gramps. Go take a pill and listen to your old unremastered non-autotuned Beetles songs.” (unspoken: just kill yourself you old fart, because why would you waste your time on such irrelevant activity when you could be a “content creator” on Instagram which you don’t subscribe to anyway.)
So that’s it: I quit. No more speed bump posts, no more kvetching about spelling errors, illiteracy, ahistorical writing or any of the multitude of sins which have infected modern writing like a malignant tumor.
I’m going back to the old standards: guns, cars, booze, women and political rants, in no specific order of preference. And if in my reading I encounter godawful spelling errors, dangling participles and misplaced commas (to name but a few), I’ll just ignore them and carry on — because that seems to be the current way of doing things. Standards? Who needs them?
And who am I to be the one not keeping up with modernity and trends?
So, for the last time:
Via Reader Sean F., another gem:
Everyone likes to tell us that if we adopt very strict gun control laws, no one who isn’t supposed to have firearms can get them. It’s so naive it’s almost adorable, or it would be if it wasn’t our rights they were idiotically talking about trampling on.
Instead, it’s very troubling because their nativity is likely to get someone killed.
This is known as “killing the message with illiteracy”.
FYI: the words are “naïve” and “naïveté”. We English writers don’t often use verbal modifications such as the acute accent (é), and the diacritic / umlaut (ï) hardly ever. But the latter should be written when the compound vowels need to be expressed individually, e.g. “nah-eev” instead of “nave”. As I recall, I learned this back in 1965, in sixth grade from our English teacher, Mr. John Ball (MA, Oxon),.
From Reader Carl M. (because I don’t see enough of this idiocy every day all by myself):
“This is the news that the Jewish State, in tandem with the US, has launched the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Its aim is to get foodstuffs and other essentials to the benighted people of the war-ravaged Gaza Strip. You would think the activist class would be pleased at this news. They’ve been renting their garments for months…”
All Hail SpelCheck!
[This item was brought to you by National Tuxedo Rentals]
A twofer from the same publication, filed under “Death By SpelChek”:
“I think a lot of the established community will give the town a wide birth in the summer.”
…and:
Stevie-Sara Russell, 43, from Essex, was vivaciously beaten by her ex-partner.
There’s only one thing to do under the circumstances.
