Six-month-old babies in TV ads who speak English like 35-year-old Harvard MBA graduates?
Dogs and other animals that can speak English as well (or as poorly) as your typically addled teenager next door?
(Or lizards that can dance?)
I’d rather see humans’ barking than dogs’ speaking English, or grown adults’ "mewling and puking" like infants rather than infants’ peorating about consumer products. At least it would more accurately depict the human condition.
Okay, I’ve gotten used to the use of the misspelled word judgement on Iron Chef. However, now it’s also being used on ESPN Sports Center.
I did a little dictionary research to see if judgement, the misspelling, has gained acceptability. The answer is yes and no. One dictionary lists the "e" spelling as an alternative, but then goes on to illustrate the use judgement by citing sentence examples using judgment, the correct spelling. It also defined judgement narrowly, saying it was "the legal document stating the reason for a judicial opinion."
Bottom line–judgment is the only spelling, deriving from the French word jugement (which does use an "e," curiously).
No one can ever accuse the authors of our Constitution of being grammar experts. Take the Second Amendment, subject of yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling. It reads:
"A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Now, ignoring the fact that, in the 18th century, people often capitalized nouns for emphasis, the sentence still has structural problems. It should read, "A well-regulated militia’s being necessary…." Being is a gerund and thus must be preceded by a possessive. Also, the comma after Arms separates the subject from the verb and is a real no-no.
In irony of ironies, considering how poor I am, I woke up this morning and opened the shutters in my living room to see the sun rising from the east and said outloud (yes, I do talk to myself), "The world is my oyster." Of course, it’s not, and actually I said, "The woild is my oyster," mimicking a Mafioso or someone from stereotypical New Jersey/New York.
That got me to look up the origins of the saying, and it is indeed something from The Bard in The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Said Pistol to Falstaff therein:
Why, then the world’s mine oyster,
Which I with sword will open.
A site called the Drudge Retort, a liberal answer to the Drudge Report, was ordered by the Associated Press (AP) to cease and desist using snippets of AP articles in its own articles this past week.
Drudge II complied, but objected that copyright law permits the "fair use" of copyrighted material, in limited portions, for scholarly and academic purposes.
I doubt I’d consider either Drudge I or Drudge II scholarly or academic, but I defend their right to quote from published sources and comment on them. This is the meaning, to me, of a free press. I do it all the time here and on my other blogs.
Anyway, a spat ensued, and eventually AP backed away from its legal threat and said the organization "needed to rethink" matters.
What really galled AP, from what I can determine from reading between the lines, is that Drudge and other sites were using the quotations as tie-ins to advertising.
Paraskavedekatriaphobia is a word formed from three Greek words: paraskevi (Friday,) dekatreis (thirteen) and phobia (fear or phobia), meaning "fear of Friday the 13th." Triskaidekaphobia means just "fear of the number 13."
There you go. Learn something everyday. Happy Friday the 13th!
I came across this site that lists the highest–and lowest–gasoline pump prices in each state and counties, parishes, areas, etc., within that state.
I checked it against my local knowledge, and while it was good, it didn’t list the stations that I know to consistently have the lowest prices. Still, it beats not knowing where to save money.
PS Unless I’m mistaken, look for gas prices to reach $5 a gallon by the Fourth of July, or shortly thereafter. They’ll come down in September or October for the presidential election and then continue their upward march after the new president is elected.
Much was made on the video waves about his earlier confusion of the word numnah with numbnut, but 13-year-old Sameer Mishra finally won the 2008 Scripps National Spelling Bee with the word guerdon. Watch below:
The politics is bad too, but I’ll leave that aside.
Congress recently passed a piece of legislation known affectionately as NOPEC, which may as well stand for No One Possibly Expects Clarity, but instead is an acronym for The No Oil-Producing and -Exporting Cartels Act." Okay, I added the hypens because no one in Washington, D.C., could possibly understand compound adjectives, let alone writing basic, clear English.
What this act does is allow Congress and its designated henchmen to sue OPEC countries if they feel the latter has been withholding production of oil and thus artificially raising prices through manipulation of supply and demand. Good luck with these lawsuits, but let’s take a look at the enabling language of NOPEC:
"It shall be illegal and a violation of this Act," declared the House of Representatives, "to limit the production or distribution of oil, natural gas, or any other petroleum product … or to otherwise take any action in restraint of trade for oil, natural gas or any petroleum product when such action, combination, or collective action has a direct, substantial, and reasonably foreseeable effect on the market, supply, price or distribution of oil, natural gas or other petroleum product in the United States."
As I said, good luck with NOPEC. And good luck with writing clear English. You’ll need it in both cases.
The sports journalists of the world made hay this past week with allegations that USC college basketball phenom O.J. Mayo had been on the take the whole time since high school.
A few days after the story broke, Mayo met with Los Angeles Times reporter Ben Bolch to deny the allegations, saying:
"So for them to say I received $30,000 or whatever the case is, I definitely don’t think that’s enough to sell out myself and my family."
That was in the next-to-last paragraph. Here’s what the last paragraph observed:
"Following the interview, Mayo slipped off into a new red Porsche Cayenne GTS with two friends and drove off."
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