To quote Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes fame): “Verb­ing weirds language”.

1. Impact is not a verb, no mat­ter how often peo­ple say “the plane impacted into the mountainside”.
2. Irre­gard­less is not a word. Regard­less of what you I might think. (How­ever, I still think it’s a point­less word mean­ing­less ver­bal bas­tard. (Thanks, Doug!))
3. Unthawed means to freeze, not to make not frozen.
4. You bor­row things from some­one, not to someone.*
5. Alot is two words: “a lot”.
6. …looks on has reached its sat­u­ra­tion point in news­pa­per photo captions.
7. I find it irri­tat­ing to be mocked by Amer­i­cans for pro­nounc­ing “about” as aboot**—espe­cially when I con­tinue to hear the word roof pro­nounced as ruff by some of our neigh­bours south of the border.
8. Even though it’s a real word, ori­en­tate gets my goat. There’s a per­fectly good word already, and it’s ori­ent.
9. Unnec­es­sary non-standard words, used in an effort to sound elo­quent, such as uti­lized where used would suf­fice, or…
10. …at a high rate of speed for fast. These always strike me as terms used by peo­ple try­ing to sound intel­li­gent; unfor­tu­nately they usu­ally make them sound pompous.
11. Com­prised of annoys me. It should be “com­posed of”. Both of the fol­low­ing are cor­rect: “The band trip was com­posed of thirty-five high school stu­dents.” “Nine­teen wolves com­prised the whole of the zoo. What a bor­ing zoo trip that was.”
12. My high-school gym teacher once told us, before a ski trip, that we should dress warm, but not “like the abdom­i­nal snow­man”. I was the only one in the gym that laughed.
13. Thurs­day is not a verb, but I feel like I’ve been Thursdayed.

* This is a French thing, and I hear it in my home­town, but not in the town where I now live. It’s because en français, the verb prêter means both “to bor­row” and “to lend”. It’s a vec­tored verb, in that it has a direc­tion. (If “vec­tored verb” isn’t a gram­mat­i­cal term already, I hereby coin it.)

** Which is a pro­nun­ci­a­tion I’ve never heard in Canada, by the by.

ThursdayThirteen.com
Tech­no­rati

• Leave a com­ment and I’ll link you up good!