How's That Chee - Lay Mon?

Don't you find it annoying when you hear some gringo say 'Chill-lay', when they mean that long, skinny country on the west coast of South America?  I do.

I mean, back in the good old days everyone pronounced Chile just like that homographic kidney bean, onion, tomato and chile powdered stew, long simmered, often with ground or chunky beef, that you ate hot on a cold winter day and were glad to have it.  Or in the summer with a cold beer at a chile cook off.

Make Like You Speak English, not French-Chinese

Standard English as well as Americanish uses many French words because the French ran England for 200 years and français leaked into the lexicon. The resident French invaders were themselves leaky:  England and English infiltrated them to the extent that, in only a few generations, they were no longer welcome in France as French; they'd become hicks and bumpkins.  Well, we all are to Parisiens.

Exact Same ...WTF?

Sometimes I think about how people have taken to saying 'exact same', as in, "It was mortifying! This girl was wearing the exact same dress I was!"  Instead of saying, 'exactly the same dress', or just 'the same dress'.

'Exact same' is crazy!  Not that the speaker shouldn't be mortified -- the other girl might look better in it -- but 'exact same' doesn't mean what the speaker thinks it does.

I.E. Does Not Mean 'For Example'

Are these the whole set or just examples?

This is another pet peeve.  I seem to have a few.

The abbreviation 'i.e.' is short for a Latin phrase that means 'that is', NOT 'for example'.

THE CORRECT ABBREVIATION FOR 'FOR EXAMPLE' IS 'E.G.'

I Have Ran This Before

Where does this madness come from?!?

It blew my mind working at a computer programming job some years ago when my college-graduate colleague sitting nearby said to me, "They should have ran that job last night."

How can you get our of elementary school, let alone college, using this kind of grammar?  Had he been such a bad kid that teachers just wanted to get rid of him?

Son of Redundancy

Sometimes I hear people say 'raise up', as in "Raise up your hands." I think about stuff like that. I think," Can you raise DOWN your hands?'  Why would you say 'up' if saying 'down' doesn't make sense?

Today I listened to a popular, local radio talk show host discussing oil drilling off the coast of Santa Barbara.  The host asked his oil industry guest, "Do you extract OUT the fracking residue?" I wondered, could you extract IN the residue?

The word 'extract' probably comes from the Latin verb extraho, which means 'drag out'.  So if 'extract' means 'drag out', then 'extract out' means 'drag out out.'  Why tack a preposition like 'out' onto a verb that already includes the preposition's meaning?

Redundancy All Over Again

One Theory for the Evolution of Man

I once infamously had an argument with a fellow about his use of the dollar sign. Seems he'd written the price of a product on a website, thus: $50.00USD. I pointed out that the dollar sign ($)  means United States of America currency, the dollar, so the USD suffix was redundant.

"But," he began knowledgeably, "New Zealand and Australia use the dollar symbol, too, so the USD suffix is necessary to remove ambiguity about which currency's price is being shown."

The Sound Of Meteorology Departments Closing

Used to be that meteorology meant studying weather patterns, knowing basic and advanced models and
units, the conservation laws, doing math, understanding midlatitude synoptic systems and vorticity, atmospheric composition, things like that.  That's what meteorologists did.

Now it's about bleached teeth, above average breasts, arm waving, using 'doppler' as a noun instead of an adjective, and my favorite new word, 'futurecast' ('forecast' is so 20th century!).

They Gave The Book To I

N.P.R., Paragon of Journalism, Champion of Education. Could your presenters and interviewees be Post Literate, too?  Yes indeed.  Might be the cut back by Congress...to the grade school budget.

If I hear someone say something like this one more time, "They gave the book to Meredith and I," I think I'm gonna scream!

Would Brewers From Sonoma Know Latin?

Well, as a general rule, you wouldn't think so.  But they'd sure know hops and barley, malt and yeast.

So why would you assume they'd know how to rightly pronounce 'Pliny', the shared name of a pair of upstanding, first century Roman citizens, important authors, men of letters?

Pliny the Elder was an attorney, statesman, friend of the emperor and mentor to his nephew, Pliny the Younger, an honest pursuer of suspected Christians. Caveat Christianus!

The Uh Invasion

Have you ever noticed how the syllable 'uh' has infested our language like a plague of cockroaches?  No?

And I'm not talking about disfluencies and discourse markers that let your listener know you're not having a stroke, but just having some 'temporary', little trouble dragging out and uttering the least non-specific word in your pathetic vocabulary.

The Three First Days of August

That doesn't sound right, does it?  You and I would agree that there's only one first day, followed by one second day, one third day, and so on.

Okay, then.  What are the three best teams in MLB baseball last year, 2012?

Maybe you'd want to say the Giants, the Tigers, the Cardinals.  You'd be wrong because there's only one best team.  That's what the World Series is all about, deciding who's best that year.  There can be only one.