Things That Annoy Me
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Something which begins as a mild annoyance can become infuriating or maddening if it goes on long enough. Such is my reaction to the contemporary use of the word "iconic." At first it was applied to fairly significant things that over some fairly lengthy period of time have become a part of our cultural furniture:
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Last September I lamented that the "lie-lay" distinction seems to be a lost cause. Joining it now, I think, are certain uses of "obsess" and "cliché." I've recently come across sentences like these in the writing of two forty-ish (I think) people, both very well educated, one of them a Ph.D: I am obsessing about
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I have always hated The Sprawl I will always hate The Sprawl.
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Not about, but on the occasion of: the complaint I made last year about the thing called "Holiday": The American Christmas has always, or at least since the middle of the last century or so, had its secularized aspect. That was fine: we were a predominantly Christian country, but plenty of people who did not
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I've been complaining for a long time–yeah, I know, this sentence could end right there, but I'll continue anyway–I've been complaining for a long time about the "generations" construct which is a sort of pop sociology thing that sometimes seems barely a step up from astrology. This chart, harvested from Wikipedia, sums up the system,
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If you can even call it writing…. Maybe just jargon. Or guff. I received an email on my work account with this subject: Implement Engaging Prevention Training at [college] I wondered what it meant. Training for the purpose of preventing something, apparently. Opened the email and saw a company logo with this text: Proven, Engaging
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…people would stop saying "science" when they mean "research," presumably scientific research. As in "The science shows that…"
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I know I can be pedantic, but I like to think I'm not excessively so. I deny that I'm a grammar Nazi. I understand that language is constantly shifting, and that this is not necessarily a bad thing. Some departures from standard grammar–I hesitate even to say "correct," so wary am I of being overly
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Some weeks ago I was asked about a remark attributed to Pope Francis by that journalist he talks to from time to time, Eugenio Scalifari. According to Scalifari, the pope said that the resurrection of Jesus did not actually happen as a physical event. This was one of those conversations with the 90-plus-year-old journalist who
Light On Dark Water 