Wednesday, April 25, 2018

Miscarriages of Linguistic Justice

"Oh, wasn't that pizza awesome?" Use "delicious" instead. Shouldn't we reserve such an expensive word for Someone whose value is beyond calculation?
"The Yankees s_ _ k. Instead of using what is becoming more and more the acceptable four letter word (which is one of the ugliest words---except in its proper context, i.e. a mother nursing her child.) Then it is one of the more beautiful English words. As to the former, use "stink" instead. Or better still use a word that shows you have read Joyce's Ulysses and say something like, "Yeah, the Yankees are the least salubrious team I ever saw."
"The third base person blew his or her knee out." Be brave and resist and say instead "The third baseman blew his knee out." Don't be afraid of being called a name because of it.
And never say, "The ballerina twisted their ankle" instead of making a gender mistake with a singular possessive pronoun which may give away one's terrible sexist unforgivable grammatical chauvinism, say without fear, "The ballerina twisted her ankle."
---so you in all likelihood just nixed your going to Princeton or some other Ivy League of Higher Learning. Look at it this way: you will save a lot of money, and won't have to go through months if not years of deprogramming.
"They did it, literally." Cut literally. "They did it" says it well enough.
"Wasn't that ballgame epic?" "Great" or "entertaining" will do nicely. I don't think a ballgame is a long poem from an ancient oral tradition. (Thanks to my friend, Helen, for pointing out "literally" and "epic" as two that she has noticed.)
And how many exclamation points does one need now to show you agree? More than a dozen all stacked next to each other? If we keep progressing this way a hundred exclamations will appear only apathetic. No, fight this trend and employ only a solitary exclamation, and even consider whether an ordinary period is sufficient enough praise.

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