Monday, April 14, 2008

Verbanizing Our Vocabulation

I have a degree in English. What this means varies from person to person. Some feel that it makes me a pretentious ass, who speaks as though he was better than everyone around them. Others feel that I wasted my education completely. And yet others--the ones that know me better--doubt this completely and/or think that the college I went to must hand out degrees to anyone who gives them enough money.

What it means to me is that I grind my teeth when I see the horrible things that have happened to the English language in the past couple of decades.

Now, I'm sure that cringing at the abuse the language takes has been going on as long as people have been studying language, but since I have only been alive during my lifetime (that I can tell, anyway), I'm going to focus on that. And more specifically, what seems to be happening more and more and more...and that would be creating new words out of old words in entirely the wrong way.

This is recently inspired by two instances inside of 24 hours. Tonight, coming back from picking up a quick dinner, I saw a place called Synergenistic Fitness. Not Synergy Fitness, or even Synergistic Fitness, but Synergenistic Fitness. Maybe it was a typo. Maybe I misread it (God, I hope I misread it...), but I fear not.

The other comes from watching a train wreck of a television series called Kymora: Life in the Fab Lane yesterday and hearing the model/entrepreneur/egomaniac the show is about refer to her life as Fabulosity. And that was no typo or me mishearing it. She said it several times. Wow. That takes some thinking to figure out.

And those are just two recent examples. The habit of "verbing" words makes no sense to me. Someone the other day told me that they had just "iPodded" some songs. Huh? It was bad enough that "Photoshop" became a verb, but I think that things are progressing far too quickly down this path. I dunno, maybe I'm too old, but it bugs me.

I, for one, would like to address this phenomenon in the only way that I can think to handle it...

Personally, I find this creativiosity to be most enlightenish. Creating a sensationly moment in my life, enhancenating even the most awesometastic happenstuff that could ever flowup to my brainly craters. But, depressionally considerating the ramificationing of the verbinations that might be creationated from this phenomenons, I wisenly figure that all intellegentsia that could inhabinate the planet could resultify in my own personalizified irradicadory moment aidicated from an outside accomplimentary person wieldifiying a projectilized weapon.

In other words: shoot me now...shoot me now...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I actually don't mind the verbisation of nouns too much; especially when it comes from a brand name or innovation (think about how long FedEx has been used as a verb).

What really bugs me is when people can't even get basic grammar correct, and reply on Micro$oft to determine if their grammar is correct or not.

Why can't people use THERE / THEIR / THEY'RE correctly???
Their has to be a way to get people to correct they're usage when there wrong... But it seems futile so far.